Look, no one has ever accused SQL of being fun. Itâs ubiquitous, itâs important, and itâs probably something you need to understand if youâre going to be doing any sort of work with data analytics, web development, and any other field that involves, yâknow, data. But fun? Not so much.

But maybe thatâs 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 SQLâand, specifically, PostgreSQLâactually works. As Samokhavlovâs GitHub explains, âEvery building is a real mechanism,â and each forms an important part of how the âcityâ as a whole functions.

Samokhavlov describes his project as being aimed at âengineers who are good at their job and have never had to operate a database,â 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 whatâs going onâand for that purpose, I recommend the introductory tour, which is accessed by hitting the âTourâ button located up in the middle of the menu barâItâs genuinely fascinating watching the various pieces of the âcityâ interact and following the little chunks of data as they whizz around the landscape.

Thatâs not all you can do, either. If you click on the little walking man icon, youâre 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 everythingâthe buildings, the ground, the scaffolding and support structures and weird machines and strange abstract objects rocketing by youâis data. Itâs like that part in Fallout 4âs Far Harbor DLC where you have to retrieve parts of one of the synth NPCsâ memory using the building system, except that it doesnât suck or make you want to ragequit because of the terrible interface.

Iâm 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 overviewâif, 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. Whoâd have thought it?