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The DuckDB Local UI

duckdb.org

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Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#91

Post by plipt »

vamega wrote: post #25

This looks pretty great. The UI looked fantastic, and the post mentioned that it was open source. However what's open source appears to be the DuckDB extension, which forwards the requests to a remote URL. I've not been able to find the code for the actual UI. Is the actual UI open source, or is that something MotherDuck is allowing to be used by this while remaining proprietary? Right now it doesn't appear like this…

How is this promoted as a "local UI" if it gets the UI from a remote URL?

Maybe the closed source UI is downloaded upon first execution for installation and then cached locally?

Or is this a web app that loads from the remote URL each time?

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#92

Post by datadrivenangel »

jarpineh wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminiscent of what Deno are doing with their Deno K/V feature, which works in the open source project using SQLite but gets a big upgrade if you use it with Deno Deploy: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv I'm OK with this. Commercial open source projects need a business model. I get why this can be controversial, but the ecosystem needs to find ways to fund future development and I'm willing to compromise on…

I have thought that the commercial nature of the (heh) mother company here, DuckDB labs, is support contracts and the like. Whilst MotherDuck is just another VC funded company in the DuckDB ecosystem. This new extension being added the list of default extensions blurs the line. That it seemingly is a proxy to closed source product from another company makes things even murkier. I can see a point for a for-pay externa…

DuckDB labs has stock in MotherDuck to align ownership.

I actually really like the close partnerships in theory because it aligns incentives, but this crosses the line by not being open enough. The tight motherduck integration with DuckDB for externally hosted DuckDB/Motherduck databases is fine and good: preferential treatment where the software makes it easy to use the sponsoring service. The local UI which is actually fully dependent on the external service is off-putting. It's a little less bad because it's an extension, but it's still worrying from a governance and principals perspective.

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#93

Post by mytherin »

jarpineh wrote: post #75
mytherin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the DuckDB maintainers here. To clarify - the UI is not built into the DuckDB release. It is an extension that is downloaded and installed like any other extension. This extension happens to be developed by MotherDuck. We collaborated with them to streamline the experience - but fundamentally the extension is not distributed as part of DuckDB and works similarly to other extensions. To be specific, the work we…

The nature of UI as an extension is somewhat hard to understand, since its installation method differs from other extensions. Even core ones. Some extensions autoload, some require INSTALL query, and this one has its own special builtin query. It at least feels more ingrained than other extensions by its user experience. Then there's the (to me) entirely new feature of an extension providing a HTTP proxy for external…

I agree that the blog post seems to hint at the fact that this functionality is fully baked in in certain places - we've adjusted the blog post to be more explicit on the fact that this is an extension.

We have collaborated with MotherDuck on streamlining the experience of launching the UI through auto-installation, but the DuckDB Foundation still remains in full control of DuckDB and the extension ecosystem. This has no impact on that.

For further clarification:

* The auto-installation mechanism is identical to that of other trusted extensions - the auto-installation is triggered when a specific function is called that does not exist in the catalog - in this case the `start_ui` function. See [1]. The query I mentioned just calls that function. The only special feature here is the addition of the CLI flag (and what that flag executes is user-configurable).

* The HTTP server is necessary for the extension to function as the extension needs to communicate with the browser. The server is open-source as part of the extension code [2]. The server (1) fetches web resources (javascript/css) from ui.duckdb.org, and (2) communicates with localhost to co-ordinate the UI with DuckDB. Outside of these the server doesn't interface with other external web services.

[1] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/src/include/duckd...

[2] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#94

Post by oulipo »

hamilton wrote: post #86
oulipo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems heavily inspired by the column summary of ObservableHQ, but that's nice!

(I designed and built the Column Explorer feature) Observable's column summary feature is very nice! But I do think there's a very common lineage around these kinds of diagnostics which motivated both Observables and ours. See Jeff Heer's profiler paper[1] for more. I'm very passionate about this area because I think "first mile problems" are underserved by most tools, but they take the longest to work out. We had to…

Interesting, I guess there's plenty of ideas to grab from their work too! https://observablehq.com/documentation/cells/data-table

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#95

Post by szarnyasg »

vamega wrote: post #25

This looks pretty great. The UI looked fantastic, and the post mentioned that it was open source. However what's open source appears to be the DuckDB extension, which forwards the requests to a remote URL. I've not been able to find the code for the actual UI. Is the actual UI open source, or is that something MotherDuck is allowing to be used by this while remaining proprietary? Right now it doesn't appear like this…

I'm a co-author of the blog post. I agree that the wording was confusing – apologies for the confusion. I added a note at the end:

> The repository does not contain the source code for the frontend, which is currently not available as open-source. Releasing it as open-source is under consideration.

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#96

Post by sergius »

Would it be possible to install duckdb extensions in python using packages instead of dialing back home to the extension service? Lots of companies block direct connections to that service but allow packages via JFrog's Artifactory.

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#97

Post by blackoil »

simonw wrote: post #51
jarpineh wrote: post #46

The UI looks nice and is by itself a welcome addition. I am somewhat at odds with it being a default extension build into DuckDB release. This still is a feature/product coming from another company than the makers of DuckDB [1], though they did announce a partnership with makers of this UI [2]. Whilst DuckDB has so far thrived without VC money, MotherDuck has (at least) 100M in VC [3]. I guess I'm wondering where the…

Reminiscent of what Deno are doing with their Deno K/V feature, which works in the open source project using SQLite but gets a big upgrade if you use it with Deno Deploy: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv I'm OK with this. Commercial open source projects need a business model. I get why this can be controversial, but the ecosystem needs to find ways to fund future development and I'm willing to compromise on…

I think primary concern is will DucDb pull something like RedisLabs. Wherein they are open source till it gets enough traction and after that pull the rug.

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#98

Post by markhalonen »

tobilg wrote: post #59
markhalonen wrote: post #10

I suggest https://perspective.finos.org/ for data viz to be built in. We use DuckDB paired with Perspective for client-side BI use case, and it's been great.

Have a look at https://sql-workbench.com eventually, as it's using DuckDB WASM & Perspective to render the query results. Let me know what you think!

This is actually how I discovered Perspective!

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#99

Post by [deleted] »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #80
gnulinux wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDB is mind blowingly awesome. It is like SQLite, lightweight, embeddable, serverless, in-memory database, but it's optimized to be columnar (analytics optimized). It can work with files that are in filesystem, S3 etc without copying (it just looks at the necessary regions in the file) by just doing `select * from 's3://....something.parquet'`. It support automatic compression and automatic indexing. It can read j…

Wow... sounds pretty good... you should be doing PR for them... I might give it a try, sounds like I should.

[deleted]

Re: The DuckDB Local UI

#100

Post by texodus »

pepperonipboy wrote: post #76
texodus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you dig it! Check out our pro version to - it also support DuckDB, Python/Pyodide and more! https://prospective.co

Wow that's really cool! Part of my PhD thesis was about writing stable treemapping algorithms for temporal data. The idea being that you want your treemap cells not to fly around like what I'm seeing in your demo, but to remain more or less in the same position without sacrificing too much on the cells aspect ratios. We've come up with a pretty effective and fast method to do that, check out the paper and a demo down…

That looks much better, thanks I will read up.
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