the unicode angle is great for moving sparklines back into the terminal especially making it into a postgres function, since it makes so much ad-hoc analysis easier at the point of query.

it also solves the problem where sparklines feel useful to somebody reading a summary and not so useful to somebody that's just exploring data "in the moment." having it be available in postgres is brilliant.

a bit of shameless self promotion, i had done something similar ages ago but with a custom webfont and some small js to handle scaling of the input dataset, solving the problem of unicode graph characters not being baseline aligned well. http://nsfmc.github.io/chartjunk/ (turns into dust while looking at the last commit date)