Source

Query Reddit with source-native SQL

The public Reddit archive — posts and comments queryable with read-only SQL by subreddit, author, timestamp, text, and score.

Surface

  • Records29.5B+ posts + comments
  • Canonicalreddit.comments
  • FreshnessLive
  • Cadencepublic archive snapshot
  • MethodPublic Reddit archive and source-native comment records.
  • StatsLast stats snapshot: 2026-08-20T11:58:15Z

Query surfaces

  • reddit.comments
  • reddit.posts

Public Reddit archive and source-native comment records.

Best for

subreddit discovery and trend analysis
public author and score aggregates
scoped lexical retrieval over comment evidence

Fields

  • id
  • parent_id
  • link_id
  • subreddit
  • author
  • created_utc
  • body
  • score
  • source_file
  • search_text_lc

Queries

Search scoped comments

Scope by subreddit first, then match the indexed lowercase tokens.

SELECT id, subreddit, author, created_utc, score, body
FROM reddit.comments
WHERE subreddit = 'MachineLearning'
  AND hasAllTokens(search_text_lc, ['mechanistic', 'interpretability'])
ORDER BY created_utc DESC
LIMIT 50;

Subreddit aggregate discovery

Compare bounded subreddit totals and latest timestamps from the enabled comment relation.

SELECT subreddit, count() AS comments, max(created_utc) AS latest
FROM reddit.comments
WHERE subreddit IN ('MachineLearning', 'LocalLLaMA')
GROUP BY subreddit
ORDER BY comments DESC
LIMIT 20;

Gaps

  • Notesubmissions live in reddit.posts; join comment trees via link_id = concat('t3_', id)
  • Notefreshness follows the loaded public archive snapshot
  • Notedeclared coverage gaps are published on the schema entry (known_holes) — read them before treating a quiet period as real
  • Notecompleteness is measured against Reddit's own sequential ID counters and published in each relation's coverage note — ~99.6% of all comment ids from 2023-04 onward are held (the capture ceiling; the rest was deleted before any archive saw it), with the weakest band, 2019→early-2023, identified by month

Related proof pages

Find the first use of a phrase on Reddit with SQL A Scry query pattern for locating the earliest occurrences of a phrase in a subreddit, with author, timestamp, score, and the full comment row attached.