MotherDuck, DuckDB's makers, having listened to its users, has
released a local GUI for easier interaction with the database.

DuckDB is a tiny but powerful analytical engine mostly used  as an embedded engine to power up PostgreSQL.
We've looked into it in several IProgrammer articles, see
Pg_lakehouse Makes PostgreSQL Quack, DuckDB And Hydra Partner To Get DuckDB Into PostgreSQL and DuckDB + Webassembly = WhatTheDuck. 

If you want to use DuckDB as is, one way, as described in the aformentioned article, is via Webassembly, which enables interacting with DuckDB directly from a GUI/browser. The other ways are the CLI, or through SQL clients such as Dbeaver.

While all of those are viable options, using the CLI is cumbersome when hosting large datatsets, while the problem with the third party UIs is that selecting, installing, and configuring them is not straightforward.

Fear not, as now there's the MotherDuck native way with the release of its Local UI. When we say UI, we mean a local web user interface which you can start from terminal by launching the DuckDB CLI client with the -ui argument:

duckdb -ui

and hey presto, you get DuckDB inside the browser as a local first application! 

You can now :

• Explore tables and views by expanding databases and schemas.
• Click on a table or view to show a summary below. The UI shows the number of rows, the name and type of each column, and a profile of the data in each column.
• Organize your work into named notebooks. Each cell of the notebook can execute one or more SQL statements.
• Dive into each column to gain insights.

The UI also supports syntax highlighting and autocomplete to assist with writing your queries, while it's under active development but not open source.

Although not Webassembly, the UI is implemented in a DuckDB extension which embeds a localhost HTTP server, which serves the UI browser application, and also exposes an API for communication with DuckDB, enabling full access to your local memory, compute, and file system.

If you are a CLI die hard, however, there's now an elegant new alternative -  duckdb.yazi, the plugin that uses duckdb to preview data files in a TUI.

Yazi is of course a popular Rust terminal file manager, while the plugin enhances it by making it possible to preview your data files in yazi using DuckDB, with two available view modes:

• Standard mode (default): Displays the file as a table
• Summarized mode: Uses DuckDB's summarize function, enhanced with custom formatting for readability
• Scroll rows using J and K
• Change modes by pressing K when at the top of a file
• Supported file types:

.csv
.json
.parquet
.tsv

More Information

UI Extension
duckdb.yazi 

Related Articles

DuckDB + Webassembly = WhatTheDuck

DuckDB And Hydra Partner To Get DuckDB Into PostgreSQL

Pg_lakehouse Makes PostgreSQL Quack 

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