Build Your Own Data Analytics Slack Agent With Shaper Learn how to build a custom Slack AI agent for data analytics using Shaper to generate charts, Excel files, and PDF reports directly from SQL.

More here: taleshape.com/blog/build-y...

Did you know you can build a data analytics agent without the LLM ever seeing your data?

That's what we did.
We teach the LLM about your data and let it generates SQL. Then we use our open-source tool Shaper generate charts/PDF reports/Excel files and send them directly to you.

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@duckdb.org is such a flexible tool that it's hard to categorize.

Is it SQLite for analytics?
Is it a SQL query engine for any data source?
A dataframes alternative?
A lightweight data lake?

It's probably the best time ever to get into game development:

We gotta make use of all those GPUs out there somehow.
And if any of those claims about our productivity in the near future are true, we should have lots of time to play games soon!

Did you know that with @duckdb.org you can directly query your database schema?

When you combine this with considerate comments on your tables and columns it becomes a powerful tool to build agents and other systems that dynamically discover and learn to use your data.

Build Your Own Data Analytics Slack Agent With Shaper Learn how to build a custom Slack AI agent for data analytics using Shaper to generate charts, Excel files, and PDF reports directly from SQL.

I built a Slack data analytics agent on top of @taleshape.bsky.social.

The agent answers your questions and uses our new API to directly send charts, Excel files or PDF reports into Slack.

taleshape.com/blog/build-y...

DuckLake v1.0 We are happy to release DuckLake v1.0, a production-ready lakehouse format specification. Its reference implementation, the ducklake DuckDB extension, is available as of today in DuckDB v1.5.2.

We are happy to release DuckLake v1.0, a production-ready lakehouse format specification. Its reference implementation, the ducklake DuckDB extension, is available as of today in DuckDB v1.5.2.

For more details, read the announcement blog post:
ducklake.select/2026/04/13/d...

this is pretty awesome! looking forward to more of these. specialized tools for our actual jobs. having hopes they can optimize them to run on more hardware in the future

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

Fiction is a great teacher:

Working on something fun for @taleshape.bsky.social 👀
Send SQL get back an image or PDF report?

Soon: Official API to generate downloads.
Point to a dashboard or just send a SQL string.
Either get back a file directly or get a URL to a file.
And files can be data: JSON/CSV/XLSX,
or also PDF or PNG.

i like to say duckdb is to clickhouse what sqlite is to postgres.
but you could also say duckdb is the same thing to prest/trino and spark

Self-hosted Data Lake Platform with DuckDB, DuckLake and Shaper Learn how to build a simple data lake platform that scales from $5 VM to petabytes of data with DuckDB, DuckLake and Shaper

I set up a minimal self-hosted data lake platform with DuckDB, DuckLake and @taleshape.bsky.social.

The whole setup is a single docker compose file that covers all basic data needs from ingest and storage to transform and visualization:

taleshape.com/blog/simple-...

Today @taleshape.bsky.social launched on Uneed and people seem to like it 👀
If you have a minute, I am happy about your support 🙏

www.uneed.best/tool/taleshape

Welcome to Shaper Shaper is an open source, minimal data platform to create analytics dashboards and embed them into your software.

Shaper - a a duckdb powered dashboarding tool

Interesting approach of extending SQL with dashboarding instructions. Slight difference to evidence with using SQL in markdown and then custom tags.

taleshape.com/shaper/docs/

@taleshape.bsky.social now offers hosting + support for Shaper!

Fully-managed, On-Premise BI with White-Labeling for 150/month anyone?

I am happy about any feedback🙏
And if you can think of any company that might be interested in code-first embedded analytics powered by DuckDB, please reach out 👀

I haven't updated my personal blog since starting @taleshape.bsky.social so I used that as a chance to give an update on why I am building Taleshape and where things stand right now:

jorin.me/building-tal...

Also: I am always happy about any ideas on where to take Taleshape next 🙏

On that note, we are currently experimenting with AI agents using @taleshape.bsky.social to run SQL and generate charts.
I see the strength of Shaper's SQL approach in how transparent + auditable everything is.
Reviewing SQL is much more doable than JSON definitions or even completely custom code.

My biggest recap from FOSSASIA this year:

It's all AI now.

I felt a stark contrast to last year that basically every talk is about AI.
No one writing code by hand is already old news.
And now everyone is automating all their processes with agents.

It's a wild time to build a software product!

What's cool is not only this new feature itself, but that I didn't built it:

You can now download @taleshape.bsky.social tables directly as CSV.

Last week Shaper got attention on HN and now people start to actively contributing and making it better for everyone. That's why Shaper is open source 💙

They often download charts to add to presentation or report.
Now the charts automatically credit where the data came from, a win-win for everyone.

This is what Shaper is all about: Integrating data visualizations into your and your customers' workflows.

@taleshape.bsky.social now has "watermarks" for chart download to make it easy for your customers to credit you.

One of the companies I work with integrated Shaper into their product. And now their customers use various dashboards regularly as part of their daily work.
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thanks! let me know if I can help with any input!

Nice newsletter!
Shaper - the viz+dashboarding tool I am building on top of duckdb just got some attention on HN yesterday. Great to see so much interest around DuckDB out there. Let me know if that's something you would be interested in sharing in some form.

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705...

Got curious why there is a sudden spike in github stars and turns out someone posted @taleshape.bsky.social on HN:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4705...

I couldn't imagine a better fit than DuckDB for @taleshape.bsky.social:

Shaper is all about using SQL to build data visualizations and sharing them.

There are many databases, but DuckDB and its powerful extension system allow Shaper to query many different data sources, all from a single binary.

I sometimes forget that @taleshape.bsky.social supports dark mode:

Hi Simon, just finished this post of yours and wanted to say thank you for sharing! I was always curious what draws so many smart, rational people to religion. And I feel like I understand it more now thanks to you sharing your thought process. I feel like I will be back and reread :)

@taleshape.bsky.social is open source for one reason:

I am building the tool I wish I had.

I don't want to keep user data in-house and not bother with regulations.
And I never want to worry about integrating analytics too deeply into our product because the vendor might some day raise prices.

Build Analytics Dashboards in SQL Using Your Editor of Choice | Shaper YouTube video by Taleshape Analytics

Have you seen @taleshape.bsky.social's file-based workflow?

Use your favorite text editor to build dashboards all in SQL!

Easier to show than explain. Here is short demo video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHYv...

(also: my first youtube video! will keep practicing 🙏)

I am launching @taleshape.bsky.social on @peerlist.bsky.social this week.
Appreciate any upvotes and comments 🙏

peerlist.io/jorin/projec...

#buildinpublic