// the find
antonycourtney/tad
A desktop application for viewing and analyzing tabular data
Tad is an Electron desktop app for exploring tabular data (CSV, Parquet, SQLite, DuckDB files) through a hierarchical pivot table UI backed by an embedded DuckDB instance. It generates SQL from your pivot/filter/sort operations rather than doing it in JS, which is the right call. Aimed at analysts and developers who want something faster than Excel and simpler than spinning up a full BI stack.
DuckDB as the query engine is genuinely smart — you get columnar performance on million-row CSVs without any server setup. The reltab abstraction (programmatic SQL query construction with swappable backends) is well-designed; it's the kind of thing you'd want to extract and reuse. Parquet support out of the box matters in 2025 when half the data people exchange is in that format. SlickGrid handles virtual scrolling for large datasets without loading everything into memory.
Last push was March 2025 and the pace before that was slow — the experimental backends (BigQuery, Athena, Snowflake) have been 'proof of concept' for years with no sign of graduation. The web frontend is described as a 'minimal proof-of-concept' and genuinely is one: don't expect to embed this in a web app without significant work. Still using Less for styling and SlickGrid, which is showing its age. Windows support appears to be an afterthought — the build scripts are all `.sh`, the icon is `.icns`, and there's no mention of Windows in the README despite Electron supporting it.