I like the “retvrn to terminals” discourse around UIs, but imo it misses why old terminal programs were (or were not) good. So it’s a boring aesthetic argument and not a functional one based on how humans consume information.

only took me two years before I needed to do my own safety triangle implementation this works great for our upcoming "quick look" editor features aside from function docs, what other quick look features would you like in the DuckDB UI?

My Data Council talk on Instant SQL is up on YouTube! Instant SQL is MotherDuck's new realtime ad hoc querying and data debugging mode. I go into details, but the talk itself is really about designing tools that both require mastery AND enable joyful flow. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSeB...

This is tomorrow! lu.ma/xakrgxqu

I'm going to be talking online about the "why" and "how" of Instant SQL, our new ad hoc querying experience that enables keystroke-fast previews of results & deeper introspection into your query's data flow. Weds. May 21st, 9:30am PDT link in reply!

So thrilled to announce we've released Instant SQL in both the MotherDuck and DuckDB UIs! It's a new interaction pattern for writing SQL queries that provides realtime result previews and deep query inspection & debugging. Bye bye run button 👋 Truly, literally only possible with DuckDB

Instant Preview Mode has been achieved internally

Migrating over my DuckDB AST path generation code to our UI. The way I've done gut-checks on the grammar is to use this CodeMirror semantic highlighting extension I wrote We can implement a very long tail of unique features with the path generator, including instant preview mode

So thrilled the DuckDB UI is out to the world! Read the post, but wanted to also share a couple small design details we thought about in thread

a gratifying animation (and much lower instance size changing times in the MotherDuck UI)

Are you ready? 03.12.2025

The prod push begins ... starting with my TS-based re-parse of the DuckDB grammar to get the end positions of AST nodes & all clauses of select & set operation nodes. This tedious work enables a long tail of hot UI magic. Can't wait to deprecate it once we have the PEG parser!

new in the MotherDuck UI: a very nice file -> table flow combines duckdb-wasm with MotherDuck to enable easy file validation and previews before taking the CTAS plunge

Big release day for MotherDuck! We're rolling out a new Business Plan and a bunch of great new features. Cherrypicking a few small design details that I enjoyed working on below (see the blog post for way more data warehouse context!) motherduck.com/blog/introdu...

We're testing a new DuckDB install experience for Linux and MacOS: curl install.duckdb.org | bash Happy to hear feedback!

duckdb-wasm now has OPFS support! This means that you can now persist a DuckDB database in the browser for a given origin. This will make caching & local operations much nicer! github.com/duckdb/duckd...

First pass at a new DuckDB extension that generates svg time series IN the db (below screenshot copied into figma) and how, using M4 should be trivial! And then setting elem.innerHTML = result even easier One step from effortlessly throwing a thousand low-cost small multiples into any UI

I had the privilege of chatting with @jthandy.bsky.social on the Analytics Engineering podcast about – you guessed it – DuckDB, exploratory data analysis, and the messy middle of doing data work. Lots of historical context! listen: www.getdbt.com/blog/interse...

Working in a DAW, one will loop over a small isolated set of tracks and work out EQ, reverb. etc. The fast feedback loop makes it easy to dial into the right sound, and then you can unmute the rest of your tracks for context. Why doesn't this exact pattern exist for UI tooling?

🚀 New DuckDB instant SQL preview feature: decompose result sets in real time! Break apart any select list expression to triage unexpected NULL values and results Scales seamlessly to arbitrarily complex expressions

🚀 New DuckDB instant SQL preview feature: decompose result sets in real time! Break apart any select list expression to triage unexpected NULL values and results Scales seamlessly to arbitrarily complex expressions

DuckDB's Node client got a huge makeover! I've gotten to watch my colleague Jeff work on it and it's been a masterclass in how to nail the ergonomics. Give it a spin ~ duckdb.org/2024/12/18/d...

My toddler is extremely into orchestral music. People are always surprised to hear this, but my wife is a professional musician and I used to be. Music is a critical part of our family fabric. It feels very rewarding to have him grow up in the culture; something neither of us quite had.

I finally did it. I bought the $160 book on the history of mathematical tables.

DuckDB just shipped a rowid filter pushdown! This can be used to get a fast tail of the table. Lots of other great uses for this too! Along w/ the tablesample pushdown PR, DuckDB 1.2 is going to have much faster ways to subset large tables. github.com/duckdb/duckd...

Inspired by the graphic design of the Penguin paperbacks I grew up reading…

Do any of my DuckDB experts know how to use sniff_csv (or any table function) on a list of files in a query? I want to apply sniff_csv to each file in a list. I can always do string templating with union all but it'd be nice to keep this pure SQL so I can make a macro out of it. any ideas?

🎯

Happy Thanksgiving, especially to all the Export to CSV buttons out there

Blink: Intent to Ship: WebAssembly Memory64

thinking about bringing both this loading spinner in to the MotherDuck app

now you can run `npm install bluesky-comments` to use bluesky replies as your blog's comment section! thanks @coryzue.com 🙌

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network. I blogged about it here:

instant-feedback SQL editing aka "query-as-you-type" uses DuckDB's AST, duckdb-wasm for local-first caching, and MotherDuck as the backend Still early, but should enable arbitrary scale and still retain a near real-time feel while writing ad hoc queries! Bye bye run button 👋

IMO SQL is hard because it's nearly impossible to build good tooling for it. And that's because of SQL's grammar (verbose) and parsers (ancient) this @duckdb.org change is huge Exciting times ahead if you work with SQL!

How does one find Design Eng BlueSky? Or Product Dessign Blue Sky?

the local regression line is 😙🤌 I bet loess might also be kind of interesting here

🚢 just shipped in the MotherDuck UI: Table Summary Click a table/view in your catalogs to see column distributions, top values, & null %s. Plus an easy way to peek at actual rows when you need that security blanket. An easy way to build intuition about your tables w/o having to write SQL!

do any @bsky.app folks know if it's either possible (or on the roadmap) to allow people I don't currently follow to chat with me?

I'm in a couple of starter packs, so I'm getting way way more followers faster than I can really handle! If you're new and you care about stats, AI, UIs, dataviz, startups, or databases, reply in thread! Or DM me. I'll follow you back.

strong agree. I'm using lists and canvases to organize stuff every day. They're especially good when pinned to my own DM channel

querying my bsky feed with @duckdb.org h/t @pedram.lol for doing something similar with the other site (1) get your user info: ``` create or replace table user_info as (select * from read_json_auto('https://public.api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=matsonj.bsky.social')); ```

Strolling by my favorite cafe + urban garden in San Francisco, Stable Cafe. It’s a physical reminder that spaces matter, whether physical or digital. Here’s to making this place matter too.

DuckDB preserves the order of tuples in tables. It'd be useful if for simple table limit queries (only SELECT and LIMIT, no CTEs, GROUP BY, WHERE, etc.) there were some kind of optimization or alternative syntax for a super-fast LIMIT at the tail Tail is almost always more valuable than the head!

saw some work earlier that reminded me of this demo of our upcoming resultset filtering functionality. I did this before parental leave. Still needs virtualization + paged batching to make it feel effortless. Animations tbd Here's me finding all the dumped christmas trees in SF via the 311 dataset

it's a small thing, but we built out a structured type system for DuckDB types in TS. Before I went on leave I wrote a tiny parser to convert logical all type strings to structured ones Now I'm prototyping a simple simple custom formatter that enables type string truncation wherever it's useful

Ok this is neat. DuckDB joins the ranks of relatively few major databases who implement optimistic concurrency control for transactions. duckdb.org/2024/10/30/a...

nothing quiiiite like spending several hours triaging a wasm perf issue, only to have the solution be to flip on one flag and get a 20x speedup

Logos seem to work best when there is harmony. Music, a thing that is written as well as played, also has graphic potential and easily recognisable motifs. See over 4000 more historical logos at logo-archive.org

probably the most exciting thing to happen for WASM in (no joke) maybe 6 years? webassembly.org/features/