# 🤗 Datasets Server

Datasets Server is a lightweight web API for visualizing and exploring all types of datasets - computer vision, speech, text, and tabular - stored on the Hugging Face [Hub](https://huggingface.co/datasets).
As datasets increase in size and data type richness, the cost of preprocessing (storage and compute) these datasets can be challenging and time-consuming.
To help users access these modern datasets, Datasets Server runs a server behind the scenes to generate the API responses ahead of time and stores them in a database so they are instantly returned when you make a query through the API. 

Let Datasets Server take care of the heavy lifting so you can use a simple **REST API** on any of the **30,000+ datasets on Hugging Face** to:

* List the **dataset splits, column names and data types**
* Get the **dataset size** (in number of rows or bytes)
* Download and view **rows at any index** in the dataset
* Get insightful **statistics** about the data
* Access the dataset as **parquet files** to use in your favorite **processing or analytics framework**


<div class="flex justify-center">
    <img style="margin-bottom: 0;" class="block dark:hidden" src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/datasets-server/oasst1_light.png"/>
    <img style="margin-bottom: 0;" class="hidden dark:block" src="https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingface/documentation-images/resolve/main/datasets-server/oasst1_dark.png"/>
</div>

<p style="text-align: center; font-style: italic; margin-top: 0;">
Dataset viewer of the <a href="https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenAssistant/oasst1" rel="nofollow">OpenAssistant dataset</a>
</p>

Join the growing community on the [forum](https://discuss.huggingface.co/) or [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/JfAtkvEtRb) today, and give the [Datasets Server repository](https://github.com/huggingface/datasets-server) a ⭐️ if you're interested in the latest updates!
