Pretzel

Data

data exploration tool

SHOW HN2024

Pretzel

Open-source, browser-local data exploration using DuckDB-WASM and PRQL

github.com

#data exploration#duckdb wasm#csv viewer#browser data analysis

227points
74comments
#333of 3,515 in 2024
Top 10%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

10 positive, 24 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 2 critical, out of 37 comments about the project. Thread score +0.18.

Idea: 6 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Browser-local and fast on large files

    From 2 comments
    • Hey congrats on the Show HN. Local, browser based data exploration works for a lot of uses cases and is so much faster thancloud based tools. We've implemented something similar…
      hitradostava on HN
    • Just tried it out - thanks for sharing. We're a sales tech startup and I've had to look through large CSVs with prospecting information in the past - anything over 10 MB crashes…
      MarcoConverta on HN
  • Chained transforms map well to PRQL

    From 1 comment
    • I was recently searching for something like this - the ability to write PRQL queries on mobile is my ideal usecase. As you note, PRQL is perfect for putting together queries with…
      DannyPage on HN

Objections

  • Browser tabs hit memory limits on very large datasets

    From 2 comments
    • 200mb of data is not a large file, and chromium tabs have a memory limit of something ridiculously low so actual large 20-100gb datasets render this useless.
      logical_person on HN
    • Hey congrats on the Show HN. Local, browser based data exploration works for a lot of uses cases and is so much faster thancloud based tools. We've implemented something similar…
      hitradostava on HN
  • Table filter UI is slow on large files

    From 1 comment
    • Just tried it out - thanks for sharing. We're a sales tech startup and I've had to look through large CSVs with prospecting information in the past - anything over 10 MB crashes…
      MarcoConverta on HN

Requests

  • Pivot table support

    From 1 comment
    • Looks great and thanks for sharing! You mentioned that you went to some length to implement pivots. How far do you think you will take the pivot feature and UI? For financial…
      dndn1 on HN
  • Save and share workflows

    From 2 comments
    • Can we bookmark or localstorage our etl?
      antman on HN
    • Very cool. Would love to be able to save/share my work (could probably even be in the url string if the CSV were online).
      xnx on HN
  • Parquet file support

    From 1 comment
    • That looks great, I love all these new use cases for WASM that are starting to pop up. Are you planning on supporting parquet files any time soon? I'd love an easy way to just…
      dns_snek on HN
  • Database connections

    From 1 comment
    • Just tried it out - thanks for sharing. We're a sales tech startup and I've had to look through large CSVs with prospecting information in the past - anything over 10 MB crashes…
      MarcoConverta on HN

Questions

  • Why use this instead of Excel or Google Sheets

    From 1 comment
    • I enjoyed your demo video and played around with a CSV of my own. This is a cool project, but I have a (perhaps stupid) question: Why should I use this tool over Excel or Google…
      ThreeMoonsAreUp on HN
  • How is it different from CSVFiddle and sql-workbench

    From 1 comment
    • Thanks for building this as open-source! How is it different from CSVFiddle (which is also based on DuckDB-wasm, I think)? Ability to have multiple tables loaded and running join…
      mathnmusic on HN

Alternatives named

  • Datasette

    From 1 comment
    • What is this offering over something like datasette? https://datasette.io/ Or even OpenRefine? https://openrefine.org/
      account-5 on HN
  • OpenRefine

    From 1 comment
    • What is this offering over something like datasette? https://datasette.io/ Or even OpenRefine? https://openrefine.org/
      account-5 on HN
  • Google Sheets

    From 1 comment
    • I enjoyed your demo video and played around with a CSV of my own. This is a cool project, but I have a (perhaps stupid) question: Why should I use this tool over Excel or Google…
      ThreeMoonsAreUp on HN
  • Perspective JS

    From 1 comment
    • Right - I used to work in GS and they had this really great internal table display tool where you could simply drag a column from the top to the left side and it would Pivot +…
      prasoonds on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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