Taking My SQL Portfolio Project From Static Export to a Live, In-Browser Database

The dashboard looked like a live analytics tool. It wasn't one. So I rebuilt it to run real SQLite, compiled to WebAssembly, directly in the visitor's browser, no backend, no precomputed export.

Author

Muhammad Rafi Arsya

Published

June 2026

Stack

SQLite · sql.js (WASM) · JS

Deployed at

steam.rafiarsya.com

SQL Steam

The Project I Already Had

A while back I built a "Steam Market Intelligence" case study to put the advanced-SQL techniques I'd just learned, window functions, recursive CTEs, self-joins, rolling calculations, to work on something more interesting than another tutorial dataset. The result: a synthetic, statistically-realistic game-market dataset, seven .sql files walking through the full curriculum, and a dashboard summarizing the findings.

The first version worked. It had charts, it had numbers, it looked like a finished product.

It bugged me a little: the dashboard was just static HTML reading from a dashboard_data.json file I'd exported ahead of time. The "SQL project" had already finished running by the time anyone opened the page. It looked like a live analytics tool. It wasn't one.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Anyone can screenshot a query result and style it nicely. Showing that the queries actually run, in front of the person looking at it, is a completely different claim.

On the blog

This is the short version

The full write-up — architecture decisions, the parts that broke, and what I'd do differently — lives on ThoughtLog, my personal blog.

Read the full post on ThoughtLog