antonycourtney

Joined 11 years ago

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Member since

Oct 27

Indie Computer Scientist and Software Developer based in SF

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Comment · 2 years ago

Yes, Tad should be pretty easy to embed -- in the github repo there's a React component (TadViewerPane), and a fairly modular API for adding a new data source. I'm happy to work with you on this, this should be a fun exercise!

Comment · 2 years ago

Very impressive project and vision! Love the demo!

I am also ex-GS and worked on what I am fairly sure is the table display tool you're describing. I tried to carry the essential aspects of that work (multi-level pivots, with drill-down to the leaf level, and all interactive events and analytics supported by db queries) to Tad (https://www.tadviewer.com/, https://github.com/antonycourtney/tad), another open source project powered by DuckDb.

An embeddable version of Tad, powered by DuckDb WASM, is used as the results viewer in the MotherDuck Web UI (https://app.motherduck.com/).

If you're interested in embedding Tad in Pretzel, or leveraging pieces of it in your work, or collaborating on other aspects of DuckDb WASM powered UIs, please get in touch!

Comment · 3 years ago

I think you're referring to Tad (https://www.tadviewer.com), which I developed. Tad isn't "the GUI tool for DuckDb"; it's a desktop app that provides a pivot table based viewer for tabular data files (CSV, Parquet, and DuckDb/SQLite database files). It uses DuckDb as its engine, but pre-dates DuckDb and was developed independently. It's listed in the DuckDb docs along with several others tools that work with or use DuckDb. All that said, I'm sorry you found it disappointing, and would welcome any constructive feedback on what specifically you found lacking, either here or to [email protected].

Comment · 3 years ago

I can understand how the older callback API for node.js might form a negative impression, but it's really not indicative of the maturity of the core db engine at all. And remember: the vast majority of users use the Python API. Even better news is that, as of a couple of months ago, there is now this package (which I wrote at MotherDuck and we have open sourced) which provides typed promise wrappers for the Duckdb API: https://www.npmjs.com/package/duckdb-async. This is an independent npm package for now, but was developed in close coordination with the DuckDb core team.

Comment · 6 years ago

For what it's worth, since folks are mentioning other extensions, my full-featured tab manager extension, Tabli (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabli/igeehkedfibb...) provides a "Copy Window Summary" action that will copy all open windows and tabs to the Clipboard as a nicely-formatted Markdown table. Tabli was a "Show HN" items about 5 years ago and is still actively maintained. Of interest to HN crowd: MIT licensed, no cloud component, rigorous privacy policy (100% in-browser), keyboard shortcuts for most functionality. I wrote a Medium piece with an overview of Tabli a couple of weeks ago: https://medium.com/@antonycourtney/taming-tab-hell-with-tabl...

Comment · 9 years ago

I don't want to dissuade you if curses-based UIs are your thing. But one thing that's been crucial to me from Day 1 is that you can type "tad foo.csv" at the command line and immediately get a usable view of your data with no extra config or tweaking needed. I mostly launch tad from the command line.

Comment · 9 years ago

Absolutely all the analysis (including filtering) works by generating SQL queries and that SQLite evaluates. Tad doesn't generate any table indices, and I'd be reticent about adding that. However you should be able to Tad as a sqlite viewer from command line (sqlite://foo/bar.sqlite/tablename) and it should make use of indices on your existing SQLite table if you have them.

Comment · 9 years ago

Really sorry about this! I do specify Tad as a handler for CSV files, but becoming the default handler was not my intent at all; I will look into what's causing this.

Comment · 9 years ago

All great feedback, thanks! Some quick replies: - The omission of '<>' from the operator list was just an embarrassing mistake on my part. #facepalm #WILLFIX - Also agree that a drop-down list of checkboxes (ideally a searchable one!) with an 'in' operator for low cardinality columns would be great. But the UI for that is a bit involved, and probably also need to provide some user control over when to do this since gathering distinct values can be an expensive operation for large data sets. - Totally agree that it would be useful to provide more interesting column stats. Thanks for the suggestions and refs to other tools -- very helpful.

Comment · 9 years ago

Good points and great suggestions, thanks!

Comment · 9 years ago

I don't think I ever claimed it was better than Excel, which is targeted at different set of users and use cases. That said, here are some reasons why some users might prefer Tad to Excel: It's free and MIT licensed with the sources on github. It's available for Linux, Windows and Mac. It works on any tabular data source. The UI for creating a pivot table is clear and intuitive and efficient (just a few clicks); many users find Excel's pivot table interface difficult and confusing. The underlying typed data model is a better fit for many data sets. And finally, it is many times faster than Excel for loading and working with large CSV files: My large test data set takes 12 sec to load in Tad vs 40 sec. for Excel.