Show HN: CSVFiddle – Query CSV files with DuckDB in the browser (opens in new tab)

Hey HN,

I made CSVFiddle because I wanted a quick way to query CSV files with SQL and share the results with other people.

The app runs 100% in-browser, so the data you import and the queries you write are never sent to a web server. When you share the URL to a workspace, all of its queries and references to CSV files are just encoded in the URL fragment.

In-browser querying is made possible by DuckDB-Wasm, which has been an awesome project to work with:

https://duckdb.org/2021/10/29/duckdb-wasm.html

There are definitely limitations with CSVFiddle (e.g. sometimes the auto-parsing feature doesn't accurately interpret the imported files), but so far it's been useful for a range of data tasks.

Some demo workspaces you can check out:

University Students by State https://tinyurl.com/6k35anth

Uber Pickups in NYC https://tinyurl.com/5n8av39h

By no means am I crapping on what you've created — it looks great, and I've always wanted to try DuckDB and now you've made a frictionless entrypoint — just wanted to point out in general that querying CSV with SQL is more accessible than some people might have assumed. e.g. here's a recent TIL blogpost from Simon Willison about him discovering how to do sqlite queries against CSV from the command line: https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations

One suggestion I would make: the Uber trips data is interesting, but might be too big for this demo? I was getting a few loading errors when trying it (didn't investigate where in the process the bottleneck was though)

Not to discourage you or anything, but Observable seems to cover this without too much hassle:

https://observablehq.com/@cmudig/introducing-sql-with-duckdb

This is great.

Will definitely be using this.

I wouldn't worry too much about people focused on running from the command line.

I love the command line. But not as a query interface for quick investigation of CSV data.

I've been wanting something like this for a long time!

Excited to give it a try.

I guess if it uses duckdb it can query parquet (and duckdb) files too?

very useful tools!