Look, no one has ever accused SQL of being fun. It’s ubiquitous, it’s important, and it’s probably something you need to understand if you’re going to be doing any sort of work with data analytics, web development, and any other field that involves, y’know, data. But fun? Not so much.
But maybe that’s just because no-one has ever turned SQL into SimCity. Here to test that hypothesis is software developer Nik Samokhvalov with a project called PGSimCity, a fully web-based 3D city that doubles as a demonstration of how SQL—and, specifically, PostgreSQL—actually works. As Samokhavlov’s GitHub explains, “Every building is a real mechanism,” and each forms an important part of how the “city” as a whole functions.
Samokhavlov describes his project as being aimed at “engineers who are good at their job and have never had to operate a database,” and while I certainly meet the second criterion, it’s time for me to be honest: I am no sort of engineer, the last time I dug into the internals of a database was with Microsoft Access, and I have not even the faintest semblance of a clue how any of this stuff works.
That should probably disqualify me from finding this site interesting, but as it turns out, the opposite is true. Once you get a handle as to what’s going on—and for that purpose, I recommend the introductory tour, which is accessed by hitting the “Tour” button located up in the middle of the menu bar—It’s genuinely fascinating watching the various pieces of the “city” interact and following the little chunks of data as they whizz around the landscape.
That’s not all you can do, either. If you click on the little walking man icon, you’re suddenly deposited into the city at ground level, free to WASD around the streets and see what you can find. This feature feels like a foray into genuinely Gibsonian cyberspace, a place where everything—the buildings, the ground, the scaffolding and support structures and weird machines and strange abstract objects rocketing by you—is data. It’s like that part in Fallout 4’s Far Harbor DLC where you have to retrieve parts of one of the synth NPCs’ memory using the building system, except that it doesn’t suck or make you want to ragequit because of the terrible interface.
I’m certainly not going to pretend that half an hour of tooling around with PGSimCity has furnished me with a sudden and miraculous understanding of how PostgreSQL works. But starting from nothing, I could at least probably give someone at a party a basic overview—if, for some inexplicable reason, they asked for such a thing. More importantly, though, that half an hour or tooling around with the site was honestly, genuinely… fun. Who’d have thought it?
