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Deep Dive

Building Real-Time Dashboards with DuckDB + WASM

Building Real-Time Dashboards with DuckDB + WASM

DuckDB's WebAssembly build opens up fascinating possibilities for client-side analytics. Instead of sending queries to a server, you can run SQL directly in the browser against datasets loaded into memory.

Why Client-Side SQL?

The traditional dashboard architecture sends every interaction to a backend. With DuckDB-WASM, teams can move more of that work into the browser.

  • Eliminate round-trip latency for sub-second query responses
  • Reduce server costs by offloading computation to the client
  • Work offline once the data is loaded

The Architecture

The stack uses React for the UI, DuckDB-WASM for the query engine, and Apache Arrow for efficient data transfer between the two.

Performance Results

For datasets under 100MB, the performance is remarkable. Aggregations over millions of rows complete in milliseconds, giving users a truly interactive analytical experience.