I agree that the blog post seems to hint at the fact that this functionality is fully baked in in certain places - we've adjusted the blog post to be more explicit on the fact that this is an extension.
We have collaborated with MotherDuck on streamlining the experience of launching the UI through auto-installation, but the DuckDB Foundation still remains in full control of DuckDB and the extension ecosystem. This has no impact on that.
For further clarification:
* The auto-installation mechanism is identical to that of other trusted extensions - the auto-installation is triggered when a specific function is called that does not exist in the catalog - in this case the `start_ui` function. See [1]. The query I mentioned just calls that function. The only special feature here is the addition of the CLI flag (and what that flag executes is user-configurable).
* The HTTP server is necessary for the extension to function as the extension needs to communicate with the browser. The server is open-source as part of the extension code [2]. The server (1) fetches web resources (javascript/css) from ui.duckdb.org, and (2) communicates with localhost to co-ordinate the UI with DuckDB. Outside of these the server doesn't interface with other external web services.
I realized that the extension provides a HTTP API to DuckDB. Is this perhaps to become the official way to use DuckDB through HTTP? For me this is much more interesting than one particular UI.
We have collaborated with MotherDuck on streamlining the experience of launching the UI through auto-installation, but the DuckDB Foundation still remains in full control of DuckDB and the extension ecosystem. This has no impact on that.
For further clarification:
* The auto-installation mechanism is identical to that of other trusted extensions - the auto-installation is triggered when a specific function is called that does not exist in the catalog - in this case the `start_ui` function. See [1]. The query I mentioned just calls that function. The only special feature here is the addition of the CLI flag (and what that flag executes is user-configurable).
* The HTTP server is necessary for the extension to function as the extension needs to communicate with the browser. The server is open-source as part of the extension code [2]. The server (1) fetches web resources (javascript/css) from ui.duckdb.org, and (2) communicates with localhost to co-ordinate the UI with DuckDB. Outside of these the server doesn't interface with other external web services.
[1] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/src/include/duckd...
[2] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui