WhatTheDuck VS perspective

https://prospective.co/ | Software Engineers | Full time | Remote only, US only | NYC

Hello! We are a small team of sharp and motivated engineers working on advancing the art of data analysis and visualization for everyone from business analysts to data scientists. And we're looking for talented and interested engineers to join us.

Prospective is a professional toolchain for analyzing and visualizing data on your local machine. It's a graphical tool that runs in a web browser and is able to slice and dice gigabytes of static or realtime data. It's built on the popular OSS framework Perspective https://github.com/finos/perspective . Prospective runs as WebAssembly in modern browsers, so it's fast, portable, and memory-efficient. It has its own in-memory data store, but can also plug into any database or streaming platform with a straightforward adapter API. Prospective integrates with existing data tools like Python and Jupyter, and all the dashboards created can be shared to ease collaboration. Our goal is to expand beyond financial services and become the standard toolchain for anyone whose job is to make sense and find patterns in large datasets.

Prospective offers a great opportunity to dig into complex software. On any given day we might be optimizing how the database executes queries in C++, implementing API features in Rust, writing new language bindings for our API, speeding up our Bazel build process, or implementing new charting or query features in our graphical UI. Prospective is engineered to be fast and stable. We write good tests, and once a bug is fixed it stays fixed.

Our team has a culture of mentorship and collaboration, and we work with each other knowing that every team member is always either teaching or learning. We pair-program regularly as a way to share our thinking and get feedback on our solutions. We hold each other to a high quality bar for performance and aesthetics, a constraint that we think creates a healthy environment for creative problem-solving.

Why do you want to render to canvas?

Perspective seems to be the most performant html table. It is more focused on extremely fast updates than styling, although it looks good.

Glide is a newcomer that also renders to canvas.

https://github.com/finos/perspective

https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid

SQL workbench also uses https://perspective.finos.org/ for tables. It's a WASM table library which pairs nicely with duckdb and works well with large tables.

Yes. We are working on adding support for aggregation and pivoting using https://github.com/finos/perspective

I haven't looked extensively at react-datasheet. It looks like it is trying to build more of a full product than the other data tables.

I have used ag-grid extensively, its an impressive product. Some pieces are a little awkward to use, particularly auto-sizing. But generally ag-grid has thought of most functionality and has a solution. The creator of ag-grid had a great interview on Javascript Jabber [1].

The other serious data table component that I have seen is FinOS Perspective [2]. This is extremely high performance, also more specialized and probably harder to customize. I think Perspective renders to a canvas element from Rust/C++ compiled to WASM (not 100% sure). It is also made for streaming updates.

AG-Grid supports streaming updates... but only in the commercial version.

Eventually the data model for these types of tables becomes tricky. I will be investigating parquet-wasm for my use case. Hit me up if you want to collaborate.

[1] https://blog.ag-grid.com/javascript-jabber-podcast/

[2] https://perspective.finos.org/

Something like https://github.com/finos/perspective ? We use an OLAP(-y) WASM engine to provide query-ability to our data visualization tool, and doing the calculations in the browser is cheaper and simpler than a server-side database for datasets that fit in browser memory.