I just watched the author of this feature and blog post give a talk at the DataCouncil conference in Oakland, and it is obvious what a huge amount of craft, ingenuity, and care went into building it. Congratulations to Hamilton and the MotherDuck team for an awesome launch!
Not yet, but I believe the DataCouncil staff recorded it and will post it to their YouTube channel sometime in the next few weeks: https://www.youtube.com/@DataCouncil/videos
It would be even better if SQL had pipe syntax. SQL is amazing, but its ordering isn’t intuitive, and only CTEs provide a reliable way to preview intermediate results. With pipes, each step could clearly show intermediate outputs.
Example:
FROM orders
|> WHERE order_date >= '2024-01-01'
|> AGGREGATE SUM(order_amount) AS total_spent GROUP BY customer_id
|> WHERE total_spent > 1000
|> INNER JOIN customers USING(customer_id)
|> CALL ENRICH.APOLLO(EMAIL > customers.email)
|> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) high_value_customer GROUP BY company.country
While I would certainly agree with you that putting the FROM clause first would be a significant improvement to SQL and was a genuine design mistake, this otherwise feels more like just wanting SQL to be less declarative and more imperative. Wanting it to be more like LINQ and less like relational algebra.
That, I think, is most developers' real sticking point with SQL. It's not object-relational impedance mismatch between their application and the data store, it's imperative-declarative impedance mismatch between their preferred or demonstrated talent. They are used to thinking about problems in exactly one way, so when they struggle to adapt to a different way of thinking about the problems they assume their familiarity is what's more correct.
I think this is why the same developers insist that XML/HTML is "just a markup language." Feeding a document into an executable to produce output isn't really significantly different than feeding imperative language into a compiler. The only real difference is that one is Turing complete, but Turning completeness is not a requirement of programming languages.
The PRQL[1] syntax is built around pipelines and works pretty well.
I added a similar "get results as you type" feature to the SQLite integration in the Logfile Navigator (lnav)[2]. When entering PRQL queries, the preview will show the results for the current and previous stages of the pipeline. When you move the cursor around, the previews update accordingly. I was waiting years for something like PRQL to implement this since doing it with regular SQL requires more knowledge of the syntax and I didn't want to go down that path.
Obviously one advantage of SQL is everyone knows it. But conceptually, I agree. I think [1]Malloy is also doing some really fantastic work in this area.
This is one of the reasons I'm excited about DuckDB's upcoming [2]PEG parser. If they can pull it off, we could have alternative dialects that run on DuckDB.
Thanks for sharing this update with the world and including it on the local ui too.
Feature request: enable the tuning of when Instant SQL is run and displayed. The erroring out with flashing updates at nearly every keystoke while expanding on a query is distracting for me personally (my brain goes into troubleshooting vs thinking mode). I like the feature (so I will keep it on by default), but I’d like to have a few modes for it depending on my working context (specifically tuning of update frequency at separation characters [space, comma], end of statement [semicolon/newline], and injections [paste/autocomplete]).
This is probably stupid, but at the hope of helping others through exposing my own ignorance -- I'm having trouble actually installing and running the preview... I've downloaded the preview release duckdb binary itself, then when I try to run "duckdb -ui", I'm getting this error:
Extension Autoloading Error:
An error occurred while trying to automatically install the required extension 'ui':
Failed to download extension "ui" at URL "http://extensions.duckdb.org/0069af20ab/osx_arm64/ui.duckdb_..." (HTTP 403)
Extension "ui" is an existing extension.
Is it looking to download the preview version of the extension, but getting blocked/unauthorized (hence the 403 forbidden response)? Or is there something about the auto-loading behavior that I'm supposed to disable maybe?
Sorry you hit that! This is actually already working on version 1.2.2. Could you install that version? That should get you going for the moment! We will dig into what you ran into.
Or, for extra fun, it auto completes to DROP TRIGGER and just drops a single random trigger from your database. It'll help counter automation fears by ensuring your DBAs get to have a wonderful weekend on payroll where, very much in the easter spirit, they can hunt through the DB looking for the one thing that should be there but isn't!
That's actually not a bad idea, to have LLM autocomplete when you write queries, especially if you first add a comment at the top saying what you want to achieve:
// Select all orders for users registered in last year, and compute average earnings per user
I really like duckdb's notebooks for exploration and this feature makes them even more awesome, but the fact that I can't share, export or commit them into a git repo feels extremely limiting. It's neat-ish that it dodfoods and store them in a duckdb database. It even seems to stores historical versions, but I can't really do anything with it..
Nothing comes close to the power of mongodb aggression pipelines.. when used in production apps it reduces the amount of code significantly for us by doing data modeling as close as possible to the source
it looks cool, but i wish i could just see the entire table that im about to query. i always start my queries with a quick `select * from table limit 10;` then go about adding the columns and joins
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.
Indeed, we are! We worked with DuckDB Labs to add the query_location information, which we're also enriching with the tokenizer to draw a path through the AST to the cursor location. I've been wanting to do this since forever, and now that we have it, there's actually a long tail of inspection / debugging / enrichment features we can add to our SQL editor.
This is a very cool feature. I don't know how useful it is or how I'd use it right now but I think I am going to get into some benchmarking and performance tweaking soon and this could be handy.
You can use any variation of DuckDB valid syntax that you want! I prefer to put from first just because I think it's better, but Instant SQL works with traditional select __ from __ queries.
Yes it comes from a desire to impose intuition from other contexts onto something instead of building intuition with that thing.
SQL is a declarative language. The ordering of the statements was carefully thought through.
I will say it's harmless though, the clauses don't have any dependency in terms of meaning so it's fine to just allow them to be reordered in terms of the meaning of the query, but that's true of lots and lots of things in programming and just having a convention is usually better than allowing anything.
For example, you could totally allow this to be legal:
def
for x in whatever:
print(x)
print_whatever(whatever):
There's nothing ambiguous about it, but why? Like if you are used to seeing it one way it just makes it more confusing to read, and if you aren't used to seeing it the normal way you should at least somewhat master something before you try to improve it through cosmetic tweaks.
I think you see this all the time, people try to impose their own comfort onto things for no actual improvement.
No, it comes from wanting to make autocompletion easier and to make variable scoping/method ordering make sense within LINQ. It is an actual improvement in this regard.
LINQ popularized it and others followed. It does what it says.
Btw: saying that "people try to impose their own comfort" is uncalled for.
In that case you are just objectively incorrect, you can build a far, far more efficient autocomplete in the standard query order. I will guess something like half as many keystrokes to type the same select and from clauses. You are imagining a very niave autocomplete that can only guess columns after it knows the tables, but in reality you can guess most of the columns, including the first one, the tables, and the aliases. Names in dbs are incredibly sparse, and duplicate names don't make autocomplete less effective.
If you are right about why they did it its even dumber than my reason, they are changing a language grammar to let them make a much worse solution to the same problem.
Edit: never mind, thanks for the replies! I had missed the part where it showed visualizing subqueries, which is what I wanted but didn't think it did. This looks very helpful indeed!
> Getting the AST is a big step forward, but we still need a way to take your cursor position in the editor and map it to a path through this AST. Otherwise, we can’t know which part of the query you're interested in previewing. So we built some simple tools that pair DuckDB’s parser with its tokenizer to enrich the parse tree, which we then use to pinpoint the start and end of all nodes, clauses, and select statements. This cursor-to-AST mapping enables us to show you a preview of exactly the SELECT statement you're working on, no matter where it appears in a complex query.
> What would be helpful would be to be able to visualize intermediate results -- if my cursor is inside of a subquery, show me the results of that subquery.
But that's exactly what they show in the blog post??
Amazing work. Motherduck and the duckdb ecosystem have done a great job of gathering talented engineers with great taste. Craftsmanship may be the word I’m looking for - I always look forward to their releases.
I spent the first two quarters of 2024 working on observability for a build-the-plane-as-you-fly-it style project. I can’t express how useful the cte preview would have been for debugging.
honestly this kind of instant feedback wouldve saved me tons of headaches in the past - you think all these layers of tooling are making sql beginners pick it up faster or just overwhelming them?
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.
It's probably different for duckdb, but from something like Microsoft SQL tossing off these random queries at a database of any size could have some weird performance impacts. For example statistics on columns you don't want them on, unindexed queries with slow performance, temp tables being dumped out to disk, etc.
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.
Please finally add q language with proper integration to your tables so that our precious q-SQL is available there. Stop reinventing the wheel, let's at least catch up to the previous generation (in terms of convenience). Make the final step.
I just watched the author of this feature and blog post give a talk at the DataCouncil conference in Oakland, and it is obvious what a huge amount of craft, ingenuity, and care went into building it. Congratulations to Hamilton and the MotherDuck team for an awesome launch!
wohoo! glad you noticed that. Hamilton is amazing.
Is that talk available online?
Not yet, but I believe the DataCouncil staff recorded it and will post it to their YouTube channel sometime in the next few weeks: https://www.youtube.com/@DataCouncil/videos
It would be even better if SQL had pipe syntax. SQL is amazing, but its ordering isn’t intuitive, and only CTEs provide a reliable way to preview intermediate results. With pipes, each step could clearly show intermediate outputs.
Example:
FROM orders |> WHERE order_date >= '2024-01-01' |> AGGREGATE SUM(order_amount) AS total_spent GROUP BY customer_id |> WHERE total_spent > 1000 |> INNER JOIN customers USING(customer_id) |> CALL ENRICH.APOLLO(EMAIL > customers.email) |> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) high_value_customer GROUP BY company.country
While I would certainly agree with you that putting the FROM clause first would be a significant improvement to SQL and was a genuine design mistake, this otherwise feels more like just wanting SQL to be less declarative and more imperative. Wanting it to be more like LINQ and less like relational algebra.
That, I think, is most developers' real sticking point with SQL. It's not object-relational impedance mismatch between their application and the data store, it's imperative-declarative impedance mismatch between their preferred or demonstrated talent. They are used to thinking about problems in exactly one way, so when they struggle to adapt to a different way of thinking about the problems they assume their familiarity is what's more correct.
I think this is why the same developers insist that XML/HTML is "just a markup language." Feeding a document into an executable to produce output isn't really significantly different than feeding imperative language into a compiler. The only real difference is that one is Turing complete, but Turning completeness is not a requirement of programming languages.
The PRQL[1] syntax is built around pipelines and works pretty well.
I added a similar "get results as you type" feature to the SQLite integration in the Logfile Navigator (lnav)[2]. When entering PRQL queries, the preview will show the results for the current and previous stages of the pipeline. When you move the cursor around, the previews update accordingly. I was waiting years for something like PRQL to implement this since doing it with regular SQL requires more knowledge of the syntax and I didn't want to go down that path.
[1] - https://prql-lang.org [2] - https://lnav.org/2024/03/29/prql-support.html
If you want to get started with prql check out qstudio https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/prql-ide it allows running prql easily against mysql postgresql duckdb etc
there's a PRQL extension for duckdb:
https://community-extensions.duckdb.org/extensions/prql.html
Obviously one advantage of SQL is everyone knows it. But conceptually, I agree. I think [1]Malloy is also doing some really fantastic work in this area.
This is one of the reasons I'm excited about DuckDB's upcoming [2]PEG parser. If they can pull it off, we could have alternative dialects that run on DuckDB.
[1] https://www.malloydata.dev/ [2] https://duckdb.org/2024/11/22/runtime-extensible-parsers.htm...
Google SQL has it now:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/simpli...
It's pretty neat:
Edit: formattingnote that DuckDB allows that reverse ordering (FROM-first)
FROM table SELECT foo, bar WHERE zoo=“goo”
it makes intellisense/autocomplete work a hell of a lot easier. LINQ in dotnet does the same thing.
I suspect you'll like PRQL: https://github.com/PRQL/prql
I haven’t tested but I believe there’s a prql extension for duckdb
that syntax is horrendous.
In DuckDB UI and MotherDuck.
Awesome video of feature: https://youtu.be/aFDUlyeMBc8
Disclaimer: I’m a co-founder at MotherDuck.
Thanks for sharing this update with the world and including it on the local ui too.
Feature request: enable the tuning of when Instant SQL is run and displayed. The erroring out with flashing updates at nearly every keystoke while expanding on a query is distracting for me personally (my brain goes into troubleshooting vs thinking mode). I like the feature (so I will keep it on by default), but I’d like to have a few modes for it depending on my working context (specifically tuning of update frequency at separation characters [space, comma], end of statement [semicolon/newline], and injections [paste/autocomplete]).
Great feedback! Thanks. We agree w/ the red errors. It's not helpful when it feels like your editor is screaming at you.
This is probably stupid, but at the hope of helping others through exposing my own ignorance -- I'm having trouble actually installing and running the preview... I've downloaded the preview release duckdb binary itself, then when I try to run "duckdb -ui", I'm getting this error:
Extension Autoloading Error: An error occurred while trying to automatically install the required extension 'ui': Failed to download extension "ui" at URL "http://extensions.duckdb.org/0069af20ab/osx_arm64/ui.duckdb_..." (HTTP 403) Extension "ui" is an existing extension.
Is it looking to download the preview version of the extension, but getting blocked/unauthorized (hence the 403 forbidden response)? Or is there something about the auto-loading behavior that I'm supposed to disable maybe?
Sorry you hit that! This is actually already working on version 1.2.2. Could you install that version? That should get you going for the moment! We will dig into what you ran into.
Curious if there has been any thought given to open sourcing the UI? Of course there's no obligation to though!
We do have plans. It's a question of effort, not business / philosophy.
It’s good to know it. I live in a heavily regulated workplace and our data usage is constantly monitored.
Good to know a totally offline tool is being considered.
Thanks for the great tool BTW.
I hope this doesn't work with DELETE queries.
Maybe in the next version they could also implement support for DROP, with autocorrect for the nearest (not yet dropped) table name.
Or, for extra fun, it auto completes to DROP TRIGGER and just drops a single random trigger from your database. It'll help counter automation fears by ensuring your DBAs get to have a wonderful weekend on payroll where, very much in the easter spirit, they can hunt through the DB looking for the one thing that should be there but isn't!
Wow, that's perhaps the most nefarious version of chaos engineering I had ever heard of. Kudos!
LLM powered queries that run in Agent mode so it can answer questions of your data before you know what to ask.
That's actually not a bad idea, to have LLM autocomplete when you write queries, especially if you first add a comment at the top saying what you want to achieve:
// Select all orders for users registered in last year, and compute average earnings per user
SELECT ...
Vibe SQLing is where it's at
DELETED 0 rows. Did you mean `where 1=1`? (click accept to re-run with new where clause)
for clarity: Instant SQL won't automatically run queries that write or delete data or metadata. It only runs queries that read data.
And this is a happy coincidence that json_serialize_sql doesn't work with anything but select queries
Can't it just run inside a transaction that isn't committed?
Young bobby tables at it again
ROFL
ROFL FROM jokes WHERE thats_a_new_one;
I really like duckdb's notebooks for exploration and this feature makes them even more awesome, but the fact that I can't share, export or commit them into a git repo feels extremely limiting. It's neat-ish that it dodfoods and store them in a duckdb database. It even seems to stores historical versions, but I can't really do anything with it..
You can try marimo notebooks, which are stored as pure Python and support SQL cells through duckdb. (I’m one of its authors.)
https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo
Definitely something we want too! (I'm the author / lead for the UI)
Local markdown file based sql notebooks: https://www.timestored.com/sqlnotebook Disclaimer: I'm the author
DuckDb is missing a killer feature by not having a pipe syntax like kusto or google's pipe query syntax.
Why is it a killer feature? First of all, LLMs complete text from left to right. That alone is a killer feature.
But for us meatboxes with less compute power, pipe syntax allow (much better) code completion.
Pipe syntax is delightful to work with and makes going back to SQL a real bummer moment (please insert meme of Kate Perry kissing the earth here).
There’s an extension for that https://github.com/ywelsch/duckdb-psql
Also https://github.com/ywelsch/duckdb-prql (by the same author!)
CTEs go a long way towards left to right readability while keeping everything standard SQL.
Nothing comes close to the power of mongodb aggression pipelines.. when used in production apps it reduces the amount of code significantly for us by doing data modeling as close as possible to the source
Does DuckDB UI support spatial visualizations ? Would be great to be able to use the UI with the spatial extensions.
it looks cool, but i wish i could just see the entire table that im about to query. i always start my queries with a quick `select * from table limit 10;` then go about adding the columns and joins
`from my_table`
will do the same!
We are working on how to make it easy to switch from instant sql -> run query -> instant sql
CTE inspection is amazing. I spend too much time doing that manually.
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.
Agree, definitely amazing feature. In the Python API you can get somewhere close with this kind of thing:
input_data = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM read_parquet('...')")
step_1 = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM input_data JOIN ...")
step_2 = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM step_1")
final = duckdb.sql("SELECT ... FROM step_2;")
a fun function in duckdb (which I think they're using here) is `json_serialize_sql`. It returns a JSON AST of the SQL
Indeed, we are! We worked with DuckDB Labs to add the query_location information, which we're also enriching with the tokenizer to draw a path through the AST to the cursor location. I've been wanting to do this since forever, and now that we have it, there's actually a long tail of inspection / debugging / enrichment features we can add to our SQL editor.
This is a very cool feature. I don't know how useful it is or how I'd use it right now but I think I am going to get into some benchmarking and performance tweaking soon and this could be handy.
Can you go the other way? (E.g. edit the above and turn it back into SQL string)
I've used sqlglot to do this in the past, but doing it natively would be nice
it can, but it doesn't format. You can even run the ast!
First time seeing the from at the top of the query and I am not sure how I feel about it. It seems useful but I am so used to select...from.
I'm assuming it's more of a user preference like commas in front of the field instead of after field?
You can use any variation of DuckDB valid syntax that you want! I prefer to put from first just because I think it's better, but Instant SQL works with traditional select __ from __ queries.
Yes it comes from a desire to impose intuition from other contexts onto something instead of building intuition with that thing.
SQL is a declarative language. The ordering of the statements was carefully thought through.
I will say it's harmless though, the clauses don't have any dependency in terms of meaning so it's fine to just allow them to be reordered in terms of the meaning of the query, but that's true of lots and lots of things in programming and just having a convention is usually better than allowing anything.
For example, you could totally allow this to be legal:
There's nothing ambiguous about it, but why? Like if you are used to seeing it one way it just makes it more confusing to read, and if you aren't used to seeing it the normal way you should at least somewhat master something before you try to improve it through cosmetic tweaks.I think you see this all the time, people try to impose their own comfort onto things for no actual improvement.
No, it comes from wanting to make autocompletion easier and to make variable scoping/method ordering make sense within LINQ. It is an actual improvement in this regard.
LINQ popularized it and others followed. It does what it says.
Btw: saying that "people try to impose their own comfort" is uncalled for.
In that case you are just objectively incorrect, you can build a far, far more efficient autocomplete in the standard query order. I will guess something like half as many keystrokes to type the same select and from clauses. You are imagining a very niave autocomplete that can only guess columns after it knows the tables, but in reality you can guess most of the columns, including the first one, the tables, and the aliases. Names in dbs are incredibly sparse, and duplicate names don't make autocomplete less effective.
If you are right about why they did it its even dumber than my reason, they are changing a language grammar to let them make a much worse solution to the same problem.
Edit: never mind, thanks for the replies! I had missed the part where it showed visualizing subqueries, which is what I wanted but didn't think it did. This looks very helpful indeed!
The article says it does subqueries:
> Getting the AST is a big step forward, but we still need a way to take your cursor position in the editor and map it to a path through this AST. Otherwise, we can’t know which part of the query you're interested in previewing. So we built some simple tools that pair DuckDB’s parser with its tokenizer to enrich the parse tree, which we then use to pinpoint the start and end of all nodes, clauses, and select statements. This cursor-to-AST mapping enables us to show you a preview of exactly the SELECT statement you're working on, no matter where it appears in a complex query.
> What would be helpful would be to be able to visualize intermediate results -- if my cursor is inside of a subquery, show me the results of that subquery.
But that's exactly what they show in the blog post??
You should read the post! This is what the feature does.
Wow, I used DuckDB in my last job, and have to say it was impressive for its speed. Now it's more useful than ever.
Does it work as fast with more complicated queries with joins/havings and large tables?
Will this be available in duckdb -ui ?
Is mother duck editor features available on-prem? My understanding is that mother duck is a data warehouse sass.
It is already available in the local DuckDB UI! Let us know what you think!
-Customer software engineer at MotherDuck
Does local DuckDB UI work without an internet connection?
(DuckDB UI developer here)
It doesn't currently - the UI assets are loaded at runtime - but we do have an offline mode planned. See https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui/issues/62.
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. My understanding is it gets downloaded at startup and then runs offline.
Kinda like regex101, draw.io or excalidraw.
Amazing work. Motherduck and the duckdb ecosystem have done a great job of gathering talented engineers with great taste. Craftsmanship may be the word I’m looking for - I always look forward to their releases.
I spent the first two quarters of 2024 working on observability for a build-the-plane-as-you-fly-it style project. I can’t express how useful the cte preview would have been for debugging.
It's neat but the CTE selection bit errors out more often than not & erroneously selects more than the current CTE
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.
honestly this kind of instant feedback wouldve saved me tons of headaches in the past - you think all these layers of tooling are making sql beginners pick it up faster or just overwhelming them?
I moved from pandas and SQLite to polars and DuckDB. Such an improvement in these new tools.
This is just so good. I wish redash had this...
Delete From dbo.users w...
(129304 rows affected)
The blog specifically says that they're getting the SQL AST so presumably they would not execute something like a DELETE.
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.
I remember your demos of visualizing the CTEs of a huge query in the editor. I'm looking forward to trying it!
Cool. Now, there's this thing called a joke...
This is such a bizarre feature.
On first glance possibly, on second glance not at all.
First, repeat data analyst queries are a usage driver in SQL DBs. Think iterating the code and executing again.
Another huge factor in the same vein is running dev pipelines with limited data to validate a change works when modelling complex data.
This is currently a FE feature, but underneath lies effective caching.
The underlying tech is driving down usage cost which is a big thing for data practitioners.
What about it is bizarre?
It's probably different for duckdb, but from something like Microsoft SQL tossing off these random queries at a database of any size could have some weird performance impacts. For example statistics on columns you don't want them on, unindexed queries with slow performance, temp tables being dumped out to disk, etc.
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.
Please finally add q language with proper integration to your tables so that our precious q-SQL is available there. Stop reinventing the wheel, let's at least catch up to the previous generation (in terms of convenience). Make the final step.
Maybe they're busy so it might be faster if you do it instead.
What is q-SQL?
https://code.kx.com/q/basics/qsql/