hamilton

Indeed, OLAP cubes keep finding new life. The critical difference here is that there isn't a heavy query engine (just a Parquet reader) and a few http requests to pull from the cube. So it's light on the backend and light on the frontend.

I think it depends on (1) customer expectations for freshness and (2) scale (both for the cubes and for the customer data in toto). There are many types of customer facing dashboards where giving "live data" is a bad idea for them and for you. And recomputation is indeed a problem, but if the volume of data isn't that high to begin with, it's probably easier than setting up an incremental pipeline architecture vs. a grouping set query in DuckDB. But I am not really a data engineer, so perhaps this is naive.

It's a good question. In a sense, the cube is caching, just materialized ahead of time instead of memoized on demand. A result cache still needs a live database behind it for misses; the cube has no misses, since every question the dashboard is designed to answer has data in the cube already. And for this experiment, the goal was to forgo a database to serve the data in the first place.

I provide caveats for when this would work vs. when it doesn't in the post. For a lot of customer-facing dashboards, I think it's probably pretty good.

Agreed, for a public demo like this one, GitHub Pages would work great (or any host that speaks HTTP range requests with CORS). I used R2 partly because I wanted to see how it behaved, and partly because the real use-case doesn't fit Pages. The source data already lives on R2 as Iceberg, the files are per-customer and would probably need auth (signed URLs or a session-checking Worker), and obviously 10k customer cubes on a schedule works better with object PUTs rather than git deploys

We do have plans. It's a question of effort, not business / philosophy.

it can, but it doesn't format. You can even run the ast!

Definitely something we want too! (I'm the author / lead for the UI)

I agree; one thing that is neat about Instant SQL is for many reasons, you can't do this with in any other DBMS. You really need DuckDB's specific architecture and ergonomics.

Great feedback! Thanks. We agree w/ the red errors. It's not helpful when it feels like your editor is screaming at you.

You should read the post! This is what the feature does.

Can you say more? Where does it error out? Sounds like a bug; if you could post an example query, I bet we can fix that.

What about it is bizarre?

Me too (author of the post here). In fact, I was watching a seasoned data engineer at MotherDuck show me how they would attempt to debug a regex in a CTE. As a longtime SQL user, I felt the pain immediately; haven't we all been there before? Instant SQL followed from that.

Correct. We only enable fast previews for SELECT statements, which is the actual hard problem. This said, at some point we're likely to also add support for previewing a CTAS before you actually run it.