After a week’s holiday ("vacation", for y’all in the US) without a glance at anything work-related, what joy to return and find that the DuckDB folk have been busy, not only with the recent 1.3.0 DuckDB release, but also a brand new project called DuckLake.
Here are my brief notes on DuckLake.
DuckDB added a very cool UI last week and I’ve been using it as my primary interface to DuckDB since.
One thing that bothered me was that the SQL I was writing in the notebooks wasn’t exportable. Since DuckDB uses DuckDB in the background for storing notebooks, getting the SQL out is easy enough.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about using DuckDB and Rill Data to explore a new data source that I’m working with. I wanted to understand the data’s structure and distribution of values, as well as how different entities related. This week DuckDB 1.2.1 was released and that little 0.0.1 version boost brought with it the DuckDB UI.
Here I’ll go through the same process as I did before, and see how much of what I was doing can be done in DuckDB alone now.
The UK Environment Agency publishes a feed of data relating to rainfall and river levels. As a prelude to building a streaming pipeline with this data, I wanted to understand the model of it first.
Why should the Java folk have all the fun?!
My friend and colleague Gunnar Morling launched a fun challenge this week: how fast can you aggregate and summarise a billion rows of data? Cunningly named The One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC for short), it’s aimed at Java coders to look at new features in the language and optimisation techniques.
Not being a Java coder myself, and seeing how the challenge has already unofficially spread to other communities including Rust and Python I thought I’d join in the fun using what I know best: SQL.
Here’s a neat little trick you can use with DuckDB to convert a CSV file into a Parquet file:
COPY (SELECT *
FROM read_csv('~/data/source.csv',AUTO_DETECT=TRUE))
TO '~/data/target.parquet' (FORMAT 'PARQUET', CODEC 'ZSTD');
I started my dbt journey by poking and pulling at the pre-built jaffle_shop demo running with DuckDB as its data store. Now I want to see if I can put it to use myself to wrangle the session feedback data that came in from Current 2022. I’ve analysed this already, but it struck me that a particular part of it would benefit from some tidying up - and be a good excuse to see what it’s like using dbt to do so.
