Show HN: Duck-UI – Browser-Based SQL IDE for DuckDB (opens in new tab)

There is an embedded one in DuckDB for a while now and it's great. I get the apeal of yours but this one is much easier to use for same cases:

https://duckdb.org/2025/03/12/duckdb-ui

Really excited about the future of DuckDB:

1. DuckLake is the best datalake spec and their team is improving on the extension rapidly.

2. With DuckDB WASM, you can make apps that would normally have 2 to 3 second latency for network calls work in < 200ms.

We use it as our built-in datalake at Definite and couldn't be happier with it.

0 - https://ducklake.select/

1 - https://www.definite.app/blog/ducklake

This is cool, thanks. I use the embedded UI but I’m going to play around with yours too.

DuckDB is the single-most impressive piece of software I’ve used in my career. I’m mangling terabytes of parquets daily and it just handles them effortlessly; the bindings also also well-written.

I'd love to make it work with flightsql or HTTP endpoints returning arrow IPC [0]! Did you consider using perspective for last-mile charting [1]? Building your own seems like a huge chunk of work. Well done!

[0] https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/clients/wasm/data_ingestion#a... [1] https://github.com/finos/perspective

Here's some quick issues and suggestions I found after about 5 minutes of playing around with it. All test were done using Firefox FYI.

1. One of my favorite features from the built in DuckDB UI is the panel that automatically generates graphs for each column, both for the whole dataset itself and for the specific query you're running. I often find myself not even writing any queries because all I needed was something really simple already available in that panel. This would be my #1 reason for not using this GUI instead of the built in one.

2. I could not find any panel to show the currently selected value in the grid view. Ideally I would like this to also be able to auto-detect common formats like JSON and format them, etc.

3. The grid view can show a maximum of 200 rows. Finding a way to virtually render the rows in an infinite list would be much better IMO. I've found myself selecting up to 10k+ rows in the built in GUI and to copy all IDs, etc, several times (saves sometime compared to exporting a CSV and copying from there).

4. The column filter dropdown in the grid view has a search bar which is nice, but it is automatically deselected on each character entry, making it very annoying to use...

5. Additionally the dropdown filter menus are not automatically closed when you click outside or open another dropdown, which is a minor annoyance.

6. The right click menu in the grid viewer will close on "mouse out", however it does not close on "click outside" and the cursor does not start inside of the menu itself. This means the menu becomes permanently stuck until hover over it if you immediately move the mouse to the top-right on open.

7. The grid view resizer is behaving buggy sometimes after changing the number of page rows to display.

8. The transparent tooltip background in the chart viewer makes the light-gray text impossible to read in dark-mode when there is yellow behind it (from other the chart bars).

9. The explorer side panel seems to be sized based on a percentage of the window size. this is quite minor but it would behave nicer if it had a fixed size so changing the window size does not also resize the side panel. It is also overly large when you first load the site.

If you want a desktop version check out qstudio: https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/help/duckdb-sql-editor it integrates duckdb functionality for parquet csv and to pivot data

This is not really a problem introduced by the thing in the article, but the "UI" for duckdb just kinda sucks. When I want to interactively explore some data, I want to easily add conditions and aggregates, but there's nothing in the Duck UI that actually does this. It will make a little table of the top 20 values of irritating_column_name but there's not a 1-click way to add `where irritating_column_name = 'incredibly inconvenient value'` to the query and re-run, which is an absolutely basic data exploration feature.

I just leave 'duckdb --ui' running on my computer at all times. While the functionality is great, I'm really not happy that UI itself isn't open source and instead controlled by motherduck. There are many quick and easy improvements that will probably never get made, as motherduck has no real incentive to improve it at this point.

Wonder if this work could be ported as a replacement to duckdb local UI?

Is the DuckDB Wasm that you are providing the same thing as the DuckDB Wasm provided by DuckDB?

I ask because I am under the impression that the 'DuckDB Wasm' client provided by DuckDB doesn't yet support all of the DuckDB functions.

So I am interested to know if this has implemented more, fewer, or the same set of functions.

What is a duckdb server? I was under the impression there is no server in duckdb, just the client.

When DuckDB queries across multiple sources (say, Postgres and a CSV) does it first load all data into DuckDB or is it smart enough to only pull minimal data needed for the query on the fly?

Love this! Here is a similar product: https://sql-workbench.com/

I haven't had a chance to play w this yet, but thank you for building and sharing this -- great writeup, sounds v useful and compelling!

Have you considered adding support for visualizing query results directly within the interface?

The autocomplete is really good, UI is snappy as well. Well done!

Thanks for building this!

Using my textplot extension doesn't result in my expected output:

---

install textplot from community;

load textplot;

select tp_bar(0.5)

---

great timing, I am literally adding Clickhouse and DuckDB for my project. This is gonna be super handy for testing

do we have analytics product that build on top of duck db yet?????

doesn't work well on phones, run query button is not visible.