Why smalty

The name

Smalt is a pigment: cobalt glass, melted in a kiln and ground to a blue powder. Painters used it for centuries, and the brand's blue, #003399, is smalt's own colour. A smalt works was the factory that made it, which is where smaltworks gets its name.

Read it another way and it says what we make: small + alternative. Every product name keeps that alt in smalt blue: smaltdb, smaltui, smaltbi, smaltdf, smaltnb.

Smalt rhymes with salt, and that's where the fun starts.

Smalty, not salty

Salty means annoyed. Smalty is the opposite: having fun doing our own thing.

Stay smalty is a nod to salty and a counterpoint to it. It's the slightly irreverent streak in everything we make. Much of the tooling for working with data today comes as separate pieces that were never designed together. We're rebuilding those pieces as one family, around one engine, because we think it's more fun, and more useful, that way.

Our community members are smalties, and they're the smalt of the earth.

Small data deserves good tools

Big data has had decades of attention. Small data, the data that fits on the machine in front of you, has mostly been left with whatever was lying around. We believe that's where most of the world's everyday data work actually happens: the CSV export, the overgrown spreadsheet, the folder of Parquet files, the database someone needs to look inside.

So we build for that. Tools that start in a browser tab, run on the hardware you already have, and keep the barrier to entry as small as the name.

Inspired by, not against

A lot of what we make stands on ideas from tools we've loved using, and we say so:

• smaltui is a SQL console in the spirit of Toad.
• smaltbi takes its cue from Power BI and Tableau.
• smaltnb is inspired by Jupyter and marimo.
• smaltdf uses Narwhals as its reference for the dataframe API, and owes a lot to pandas and Polars.

We're not here to replace any of them. What we add is one family built to work together, all in the browser, for small data.

How we talk

• Say what things are, not what they aren't.
• Don't pick fights. We credit the tools that shaped us and never knock them.
• No numbers without sources. A benchmark figure appears only with its method beside it.
• Keep it light. A little sass, never at anyone's expense.

The full rules are in the brand book.