DuckDB Now Ships With a Web User Interface

Posted on by Ian

DuckDB has enhanced its user experience with the introduction of a new web-based user interface in the v1.2.1 release. This addition brings graphical interaction capabilities to the analytical database system, making it more accessible to users who prefer visual interfaces over command-line operations.

The new DuckDB UI allows users to interact with their databases through a browser, enabling straightforward query execution, result visualization, and database management. This is a positive development for DuckDB, which has gained popularity for its powerful embedded analytical processing capabilities and SQL support.

Features

The main features of the DuckDB UI at the time of writing include:

  • Query Editor: A SQL editor with syntax highlighting for writing and executing queries directly in the browser
  • Results Visualization: Clean tabular displays of query results with pagination and sorting options
  • Schema Browser: Visual exploration of database structure, tables, and columns
  • Interactive Notebooks: Define SQL scripts and show the results of queries
  • Export Functionality: Options to download query results in various formats

How to Launch the DuckDB UI

The DuckDB UI comes with DuckDB itself (starting from DuckDB v1.2.1). Therefore, you’ll need to ensure you have that version or higher first.

Once you’ve got DuckDB v1.2.1 or higher, getting started with the new UI is straightforward. We have some options when it comes to launching the DuckDB UI.

Launch DuckDB with the UI enabled:

duckdb -ui

You can also launch it from within a DuckDB client (such as the DuckDB CLI, Java, Python, etc) by running the following command:

CALL start_ui();

Both of those options install the ui extension (if not already installed), then open the DuckDB UI in your browser.

Here’s the page that opened in my browser when I first ran it:

Who Created the DuckDB UI

The DuckDB UI is a result of a collaboration between DuckDB Labs and MotherDuck. MotherDuck contracts with DuckDB Labs for development services, and DuckDB Labs owns a portion of MotherDuck.