Statistics that live in your SQL

williamcotton•about 2 hours ago

The plotting aspect of this seems very similar to:

https://opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-04-20_ggsql_alpha_rele...

caerbannogwhite•about 2 hours ago

That's exactly the inspiration! I made a post here on HN about that a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108815

My plan is to release a blog post about all VISUALIZE current features next week, explicitly mentioning Posit's alpha GGPLOT.

/edit: clarifications

thomasp85•about 1 hour ago

ggsql developer here. It's quite fun to see an alternative implementation of our syntax so early. Why did you decide on this path rather than working with the ggsql duckdb extension? (honest curious question - not trying to push you away from your path)

I can only imagine the load you might end up in if you have to keep feature parity with ggsql along with all the other features you have

caerbannogwhite•about 1 hour ago

First of all, nice to meet you! The honest answer is timing: the first VISUALIZE commit on my side was april 25th; ggsql-duckdb's first commit was April 23rd. So I genuinely didn't know it existed!

About the name: yours is the official Posit one, and you were there first, so I'll rename my branding; there should be one ggsql, and it's yours. Mine only exposes VISUALIZE as the keyword anyway.

The actual name of the extension is the-stats-duck, which runs inside duckdb-wasm (it powers an in-browser data tool) and emits a Vega-Lite spec inline for the host to render. Your implementation (which I think is Rust based and an in-process HTTP server that opens a browser), is a native pattern, but correct me if I'm wrong! mine is deliberately thin and wasm-safe, not a whole engine.

About the parity, you're right, and I'm not chasing it; for real grammar-of-graphics, ggsql should be the tool! but, if that's ok with you, I'd love to keep the syntax aligned!

geysersam•about 1 hour ago

Looks great!

One minor correction - the `summarize` function in duckdb can also be used in CTEs etc.

But you have to wrap the `summarize` in a `from` clause like this:

  with
    some_table as (from range(10)),
    x as (from (summarize some_table))
  from x;

caerbannogwhite•42 minutes ago

Thank you! I'll add note about it

PashaGo•33 minutes ago

Interesting, but I think it works only for quick ad-hoc analysis. For dashboards or deeper research, you still need other tools

caerbannogwhite•25 minutes ago

Yes, that's exactly its main purpose! I initially started because I needed a dataset browser. I work with clinical trials, so we usually get raw data files in all possible formats, from CSV to EXCEL and, of course, SAS formats. But since I was already using DuckDB, I thought about extending it a bit further, so you can quickly get a glance at the data.

Statistics that live in your SQL

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