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i’m one of the co-founders at MotherDuck. our team is building the UI in collaboration with the team at DuckDB Labs.

this is a first release. we know there are going to be tons of feature requests (including @antman’s request for simple charts). feel free to chime in on this thread and we’ll keep an eye on it!

meanwhile, hope you enjoy this release! we had lots of fun building it.




> The DuckDB UI is also fully open source: visit the duckdb/duckdb-ui repository if you want to dive in deeper.

Is this really the case? The repo doesn’t seem to have any ui elements?


We updated the video [if that's the reference], because it is not yet open source. Thanks for pointing that out!


Is it going to be open source?


Y'all at MotherDuck are doing such a great job that I encourage you to not try and muddle the open/closed source divide, at least not this early in the startup lifecycle. Having a local MotherDuck interface is awesome, and doesn't gain much by being 'open source'. Wait to cash out on the community good will when the rewards are higher.


After playing around for a while, a few things come to mind:

* Being able to specify a db at startup would be pretty cool. I'm teaching a class on SQL this summer and I'm already envisioning workflows where a gatekeeper proxy spins up duckdb-ui containers on-demand for users as they log in/out, and it would be much better if the UI can be pre-seeded with an existing database.

* This is maybe a big ask, but markdown cells in notebooks would be nice. Again thinking of my classroom use-case, it would be nice to distribute course materials (lessons/exercises/etc) as notebooks, but that's a bit of a non-starter without markdown or some equivalent content-centric cell type.

* Not a feature request, I just have to say I'm a big fan of how well it handles displaying massive datasets with on-demand streaming and all. I was imagining that I'd have to introduce the `LIMIT` clause right off the bat so that people don't swamp themselves with 100k's of rows, but if I end up using this then maybe I can hold off on that and introduce it at a more natural time.

Regardless, this is great and I definitely have uses for it outside the class I mentioned, so thanks!


    duckdb -ui pre_seeded_db.db

    duckdb -ui -init startup.sql
where startup.sql contains various statements/commands like `.open pre_seeded_db.db`

Alternatively place statements/commands in `~/.duckdbrc` and just run `duckdb -iu`.


Is this feature open source?


Maybe you've already seen, but it appears the answer is no, based on xemoka's comment here quoting someone at duckdb

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344932


How do you compete with Supabase ? Do you have a built in authentication system? Anything like edge functions.

I've been trying to build a small card game with Supabase and I'm sorta stuck...


Supabase IMO sits in the middle of the curve between Firebase and PocketBase, not really the same use case as DuckDB & MotherDuck.


Motherduck has pretty generous free usage limits, I figured it was worth asking...


Not really the same use-case. DuckDB is more for read-heavy analytical uses.


The form to get the free e-book doesn't seem to work.


I just tried it. Worked for me.




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