by philbe77 | 2025-04-07 19:48:20+00:00
Hi, I'm Philip Moore - founder of GizmoData (https://gizmodata.com).

I recently posted on Show HN about my company's product: GizmoSQL - here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427671

Since posting that, I wanted to make it easier for folks to "kick the tires" of GizmoSQL at https://app.gizmodata.com

There you can run interactive SQL queries against a 1TB TPC-H database file. The "lineitem" table has nearly 6 billion records...

Right now, I just have a single Azure Cobalt 100 (arm64) VM running the database (I have a very small company) - so I may scale this up (or shut it down) - depending on usage/interest.

I built the front-end GUI with help from lovable.dev (I'm typically a back-end engineer). The middle-tier is a Python-based websocket proxy server I built for Arrow Flight SQL - which makes it easy to hook up a javascript frontend (i.e. a browser) to an Arrow Flight SQL database server (which GizmoSQL is). I haven't decided if I want to open-source this piece yet, but I am thinking about it...

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Here are some more details on GizmoSQL - what it is, and what it does:

GizmoSQL allows you to run DuckDB or SQLite as a server (remotely) - harnessing the power of computers in the cloud - which typically have more CPUs, more memory, and faster storage (NVMe) than your laptop. In fact, running GizmoSQL on a modern arm64-based VM in Azure, GCP, or AWS allows you to run at terabyte scale - with equivalent (or better) performance - for a fraction of the cost of other popular platforms such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks SQL.

GizmoSQL is self-hosted (for now) - with a possible SaaS offering in the near future. It has these features to differentiate it from "base" DuckDB:

Run DuckDB or SQLite as a server (remote connectivity) * Concurrency - allows multiple users to work simultaneously - with independent, ACID-compliant sessions * Security * Authentication * TLS for encryption of traffic to/from the database * Static executable with Arrow Flight SQL, DuckDB, SQLite, and JWT-CPP built-in. There are no dependencies to install - just a single executable file to run * Free for use in development, evaluation, and testing * Easily containerized for running in the Cloud - especially in Kubernetes * Because it is powered by DuckDB - GizmoSQL can work with the popular open-source data formats - such as Iceberg, Delta Lake, Parquet, and more.

GizmoSQL performs very well (when running DuckDB as its back-end execution engine) - check out our graph comparing popular SQL engines for TPC-H at scale-factor 1 Terabyte - on the homepage at: https://gizmodata.com/gizmosql - there you will find it also costs far less than other options.

We would love to get your feedback on the software - it is easy to get started for free in two different ways:

For a limited time - try GizmoSQL online on our dime - with the SQL Query Navigator - it just requires a quick registration and sign-in to get going - at: https://app.gizmodata.com - where we have a read-only 1TB TPC-H database mounted for you to query in real-time. It is running on an Azure Cobalt 100 VM - with local NVMe SSD's - so it should be quite zippy.

Download and self-host GizmoSQL - using our Docker image or executables for Linux and macOS for both x86-64 and arm64 architectures. See our README at: https://github.com/gizmodata/gizmosql-public for details on how to easily and quickly get started that way

Thank you for taking a look at GizmoSQL. We are excited and are glad to answer any questions you may have!

Public facing repo (README): https://github.com/gizmodata/gizmosql-public?tab=readme-ov-f... HomePage: https://gizmodata.com/gizmosql ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gizmosql?embed=true&utm_so... Try GizmoSQL online: https://app.gizmodata.com GizmoSQL in action video: https://youtu.be/QSlE6FWlAaM