I wrote a Parquet viewer in Rust to avoid running SQL for the PM

Every data team knows the drill: a PM needs to “just take a quick look” at some Parquet data. That usually means asking an engineer to write SQL or spin up a tool to pull a few rows. It’s a small ask, but one that happens often enough to slow everyone down.

That’s why I built Tablr — an extremely simple desktop app for browsing Parquet files quickly and without any coding.

It’s a native desktop app written in Rust, powered by the blazing-fast Polars library and the egui UI framework, and it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Key Features

Here’s what you get out of the box:

• 🗂️ Multi-file support – Load single files or partitioned datasets with ease.

• ⚡ Infinite scrolling – Efficiently scroll through massive datasets, thanks to Polars’ lazy execution.

• 🔍 Basic filtering and sorting – Click on a column to sort, or filter rows using simple operations like “equals” or “contains”.

• 💻 Native performance – Built with Rust for speed and low memory usage.

• 🌐 Cross-platform – Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

How to Try it

There aren’t prebuilt binaries yet, but if you’ve got Rust installed, it’s easy to get up and running:

git clone https://github.com/lzm0/tablr
cd tablr
cargo run --release

One of my favourite features is that you can open Parquet files straight from your terminal — no GUI navigation required. Just point it at a .parquet file:

tablr path/to/your_file.parquet

Or, if you’ve got a folder of partitioned files:

tablr path/to/your_dataset/*.parquet

Get Involved

For ideas, bug reports and pull requests, jump in here:

👉 https://github.com/lzm0/tablr