datacharter 0.2.0

Charter your data — contract-governed local data exploration, powered by DuckDB

DataCharter

Explore all your data locally, in one place — contract-governed data exploration, powered by DuckDB

Contract-governed local data exploration, powered by DuckDB. Define your sources as data contracts (ODCS-compatible YAML), query them through DuckDB's SQL federation engine with real source pushdowns, explore in a local web UI — charts, profiling, SQL editor — and optionally ask questions in plain language with a fully local model.

Status: pre-release. V1 in development.

Quick start

# Try it instantly on generated demo data — no config, nothing to install globally:
uvx datacharter serve
# → opens a local workspace on http://127.0.0.1:8321

# Or install it:
pip install datacharter

# Start a real workspace:
datacharter init            # scaffolds charter.yaml, queries/, .env.example
datacharter serve           # explore in your browser

# Natural-language agent — bring your own endpoint…
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=...  # any OpenAI-compatible API
export OPENAI_API_KEY=...
datacharter serve
# …or run fully local (no API key, no data leaves your machine):
datacharter serve --local   # uses Ollama (qwen3:8b by default)

Drop a CSV, Parquet, or JSON file onto the window to query it instantly.

Why

• Your contracts are the catalog. charter.yaml describes sources, tables, and PII fields — the same contract spec your data team already writes.
• One engine, every source. Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, BigQuery, SQL Server, S3/GCS/Azure files, Iceberg, Delta — federated joins across all of them, with filters and projections pushed down where the data lives — even across a cross-source join, each leg is filtered at its source. Snowflake is supported via connector extract (datacharter[snowflake]) with filters/projections pushed into the extract. Every source's tables are exposed under one flat source__table naming scheme.
• Local-first. One process, your machine, no cloud dependency. Optional --local agent mode runs a small open model via Ollama — no API key, no data leaves your machine.
• The workspace is a directory. charter.yaml + queries/*.sql + .env.example — commit it, clone it, datacharter serve. Your team's whole exploration environment travels as a repo; secrets and local state never do.

Built on

DataCharter stands on excellent open-source foundations:

• DuckDB — the analytical engine at our core: federation (ATTACH), file formats, Iceberg/Delta, encryption, autocomplete.
• Open Data Contract Standard / datacontract.com — the contract format charter.yaml speaks.
• Vega-Lite — declarative charting.
• Monaco Editor — the SQL editor.

DuckDB is a trademark of the DuckDB Foundation. DataCharter is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the DuckDB Foundation.

License

Apache-2.0