SQLRooms: Local-First Analytics with DuckDB, Collaborative Canvas, and Loro CRDT Sync

Video FOSDEM page SQLRooms

I gave this talk at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels, in the Local-First, sync engines, CRDTs developer room.

The talk focused on SQLRooms, our open-source framework for building local-first analytics tools powered by DuckDB. I covered how SQLRooms can run entirely in the browser with DuckDB-WASM, or connect to a shared backend running native DuckDB for larger datasets, while still keeping the application architecture local-first.

I also presented our ongoing work on collaborative canvases, notebooks, and dependency tracking between cells, together with CRDT-based sync using Loro. One of the key ideas is that in analytics apps the data itself does not always need to be synchronized. DuckDB can stay a read-only query engine, while collaboration is handled by syncing the UI state: queries, layouts, annotations, comments, and notebook structure.

Video:

The conference materials are linked from the FOSDEM event page above.