Columnq

Simple CLI to help you query tabular data with support for a rich set of growing formats and data sources.

It supports JSON, CSV, Parquet, Arrow and all other formats that are supported by ROAPI, which is documented at here.

It also supports querying datasets from remote locations like S3 and HTTPs, see ROAPI's blob store documentation for more info.

Installation

Pre-built binary

The pre-built binaries hosted on GitHub releases. These binaries are self-contained so you can just drop them into your PATH.

The same set of binaries are also distributed through PyPI:

pip install columnq-cli

Build from source

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/roapi/roapi --branch main --bins columnq-cli

Usage

One off query

The sql subcommand executes a provided SQL query against specificed static dataset and returns the result in stdout on exit. This is usually useful for script automation tasks.

$ columnq sql --table test_data/spacex_launches.json \
  "SELECT COUNT(id), DATE_TRUNC('year', CAST(date_utc AS TIMESTAMP)) as d FROM spacex_launches WHERE success = true GROUP BY d ORDER BY d DESC"
+-----------+---------------------+
| COUNT(id) | d                   |
+-----------+---------------------+
| 4         | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 26        | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 13        | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 21        | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 18        | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 8         | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 6         | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 6         | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 3         | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 2         | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 2         | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 1         | 2009-01-01 00:00:00 |
| 1         | 2008-01-01 00:00:00 |
+-----------+---------------------+

By default, the sql subcommand outputs results in human friendly table format. You can change the output format using --output option to make it more friendly for automations.

$ columnq sql --table test_data/spacex_launches.json --output json "SELECT COUNT(id) AS total_launches FROM spacex_launches"
[{"total_launches":132}]

Automate with UNIX pipes

Just like other UNIX tools, columnq supports consuming data stream from stdin to integrate with other CLI tools using UNIX pipe:

find . -printf "%M|%n|%u|%s|%P\n" | columnq sql \
    --table 't=stdin,format=csv,has_header=false,delimiter=|' \
    "SELECT SUM(column_4) as total_size FROM t"
+------------+
| total_size |
+------------+
| 9875017987 |
+------------+

Format conversion

The Columnq CLI can also be used as a handy utility to convert tabular data between various formats: json, parquet, csv, yaml, arrow, etc.

$ columnq sql --table 't=test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv' 'SELECT * FROM t' --output json
$ cat test_data/blogs.parquet | columnq sql --table 't=stdin,format=parquet' 'SELECT * FROM t' --output json

Interactive console

For dataset exploration, you can use the console subcommand to query multiple datasets in an interactive console environment:

$ columnq console \
    --table "uk_cities=test_data/uk_cities_with_headers.csv" \
    --table "test_data/spacex_launches.json"
columnq(sql)> SELECT * FROM uk_cities WHERE lat > 57;
+-----------------------------+-----------+-----------+
| city                        | lat       | lng       |
+-----------------------------+-----------+-----------+
| Elgin, Scotland, the UK     | 57.653484 | -3.335724 |
| Aberdeen, Aberdeen City, UK | 57.149651 | -2.099075 |
| Inverness, the UK           | 57.477772 | -4.224721 |
+-----------------------------+-----------+-----------+
columnq(sql)> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM spacex_launches WHERE success=true AND upcoming=false;
+-----------------+
| COUNT(UInt8(1)) |
+-----------------+
| 111             |
+-----------------+

Explore in memory catalog and table schemas:

columnq(sql)> SHOW TABLES;
+---------------+--------------------+-----------------+------------+
| table_catalog | table_schema       | table_name      | table_type |
+---------------+--------------------+-----------------+------------+
| datafusion    | public             | uk_cities       | BASE TABLE |
| datafusion    | public             | spacex_launches | BASE TABLE |
| datafusion    | information_schema | tables          | VIEW       |
| datafusion    | information_schema | columns         | VIEW       |
+---------------+--------------------+-----------------+------------+
columnq(sql)> SHOW COLUMNS FROM uk_cities;
+---------------+--------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+
| table_catalog | table_schema | table_name | column_name | data_type | is_nullable |
+---------------+--------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+
| datafusion    | public       | uk_cities  | city        | Utf8      | NO          |
| datafusion    | public       | uk_cities  | lat         | Float64   | NO          |
| datafusion    | public       | uk_cities  | lng         | Float64   | NO          |
+---------------+--------------+------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+

Development

Debug mode

Set the RUST_LOG environment variable to info,columnq=debug to run columnq in verbose debug logging.