The DuckDB UI
Are you using the DuckDB user interface? It might just be the easy data exploration tool you've been looking for.
As far back as version 3.5, duckdb has been included with the standard Python distribution for ArcGIS Pro. DuckDB is a powerful analytics database engine that reads from a wide variety of sources common in GIS work. It even has a spatial extension that enables it to read shapefiles and feature classes.
If you're doing data engineering work in Python in the ArcGIS Pro environment, you may already be (or should be) using DuckDB. DuckDB's Python API is great and fairly easy to write with. What's even better though is that it's really easy to start up a DuckDB UI from ArcGIS Pro. All you need to do is open up Python anywhere in ArcGIS Pro and write the following lines:
import duckdb
duckdb.sql("call start_ui()")
That's it. Just run that and you get a nice UI.
You'll see this nice little message and it'll open up the UI in your browser of choice.
Now what? Write some SQL
So now you've got this crazy powerful analytical SQL engine and it's got a nice user interface. What are some ways that you might use this in your analysis?
Read and summarize big(ish) data.
You've invariably been given some data in the form of a CSV that's way too big for Excel to read. You can always interact with that data in ArcGIS Pro, but now you can do it in the DuckDB UI as well. DuckDB has some built-in readers for things like CSV, Parquet, JSON, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
select
*
from
read_csv('PATH_TO_YOUR_CSV');
Use the spatial extension
If you just absolutely can't wait to get your hands on some spatial data, you can import the spatial extension for DuckDB and write some spatial SQL. At the very least you can read from a wider variety of spatial formats like file geodatabase feature classes and GeoJSON.
install spatial;
load spatial;
select
*
from
ST_Read('PATH_TO_YOUR_GEODATABASE', layer = 'FEATURE_CLASS_NAME');
Get Exploring
DuckDB is a very powerful tool in your GIS analysis toolkit. The DuckDB UI just makes it that much easier to use. It's there in ArcGIS Pro. Check it out.
