{"id":1091,"date":"2026-07-28T14:38:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=1091"},"modified":"2026-07-28T14:38:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:38:59","slug":"this-simcity-like-visualization-turns-techs-most-boring-systems-into-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=1091","title":{"rendered":"This SimCity-Like Visualization Turns Tech\u2019s Most Boring Systems Into Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Look, no one has ever accused SQL of being fun. It\u2019s ubiquitous, it\u2019s important, and it\u2019s probably something you need to understand if you\u2019re going to be doing any sort of work with data analytics, web development, and any other field that involves, y\u2019know, data. But fun? Not so much.<\/p>\n

Read more Back to School: The Best Tech to Help You Lock In<\/a><\/p>\n

But maybe that\u2019s just because no-one has ever turned SQL into SimCity<\/em>. 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\u2014and, specifically, PostgreSQL\u2014actually works. As Samokhavlov\u2019s GitHub explains, \u201cEvery building is a real mechanism,\u201d and each forms an important part of how the \u201ccity\u201d as a whole functions.<\/p>\n

Samokhavlov describes his project as being aimed at \u201cengineers who are good at their job and have never had to operate a database,\u201d and while I certainly meet the second criterion, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019s going on\u2014and for that purpose, I recommend the introductory tour, which is accessed by hitting the \u201cTour\u201d button located up in the middle of the menu bar\u2014It\u2019s genuinely fascinating watching the various pieces of the \u201ccity\u201d interact and following the little chunks of data as they whizz around the landscape.<\/p>\n

Read more San Diego Comic-Con 2026: Our Favorite Moments (and How to Travel Connected With Ubigi)<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

That\u2019s not all you can do, either. If you click on the little walking man icon, you\u2019re 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\u2014the buildings, the ground, the scaffolding and support structures and weird machines and strange abstract objects rocketing by you\u2014is data. It\u2019s like that part in Fallout 4<\/em>\u2019s Far Harbor<\/em> DLC where you have to retrieve parts of one of the synth NPCs\u2019 memory using the building system, except that it doesn\u2019t suck or make you want to ragequit because of the terrible interface.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2014if, 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\u2026 fun. Who\u2019d have thought it?<\/p>\n

Read more Nvidia Throws Its Support Behind OpenAI, Open AI, and\u2026 Super-Closed AI?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fun with SQL? Cyberspace is the place!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThis SimCity-Like Visualization Turns Tech\u2019s Most Boring Systems Into Fun - Long Haul Moving Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/longhaulmovingpros.com\/?p=1091\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"This SimCity-Like Visualization Turns Tech\u2019s Most Boring Systems Into Fun - Long Haul Moving Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fun with SQL? 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