sq

Small bugfix release.

Fixed

• #415: The JSON ingester could fail due to a bug when a JSON blob landed on the edge of a buffer.
• The JSON ingester wasn't able to handle the case where a post-sampling JSON field had a different kind from the kind determined by the sampling process. For example, let's say the sample size was 1000, and the field zip was determined to be of kind int, because values 0-1000 were all parseable as integers. But then the 1001st value was BX123, which obviously is not an integer. sq will now see the non-integer value, and alter the ingest DB schema to a compatible kind, e.g. text. This flexibility is powerful, but it does come at the cost of slower ingest speed. But that's a topic for another release.

This release features significant improvements to sq diff.

Added

• Previously sq diff --data diffed every row, which could get crazy with a large table. Now the command stops after N differences, where N is controlled by the --stop (-n) flag, or the new config option diff.stop. The default stop-after value is 3; set to 0 to show all differences.

  # Stop on first difference
  $ sq diff @prod.actor @staging.actor --data --stop 1
  
  # Stop after 5 differences, using the -n shorthand flag
  $ sq diff @prod.actor @staging.actor --data -n5
  

• [#353]: The performance of sq diff has been significantly improved. There's still more to do.

• Previously, sq diff --data compared the rendered (text) representation of each value. This could lead to inaccurate results, for example with two timestamp values in different time zones, but the text rendering omitted the time zone. Now, sq diff --data compares the raw values, not the rendered text. Note in particular with time values that both time and location components are compared.

• sq can now handle a SQLite DB on stdin. This is useful for testing, or for working with SQLite DBs in a pipeline.

  $ cat sakila.db | sq '.actor | .first_name, .last_name'
  

  It's also surprisingly handy in daily life, because there are sneaky SQLite DBs all around us. Let's see how many text messages I've sent and received over the years:

  $ cat ~/Library/Messages/chat.db | sq '.message | count'
  count
  215439
  

  I'm sure that number makes me an amateur with these millenials 👴🏻.

  Note that you'll need to enable macOS Full Disk Access to read the chat.db file.

• sq now allows you to use true and false literals in queries. Which, in hindsight, does seem like a bit of an oversight 😳. (Although previously you could usually get away with using 1 and 0).

  $ sq '.people | where(.is_alive == false)'
  name        is_alive
  Kubla Khan  false
  
  $ sq '.people | where(.is_alive == true)'
  name         is_alive
  Kaiser Soze  true
  

Changed

• ☢️ Previously, sq diff only exited non-zero on an error. Now, sq diff exits 0 when no differences, exits 1 if differences are found, and exits 2 on any error. This aligns with the behavior of GNU diff:

  Exit status is 0 if inputs are the same, 1 if different, 2 if trouble.
  

• Minor fiddling with the color scheme for some command output.

Minor bug fix release. See the earlier v0.47.0 release for recent headline features.

Fixed

• Shell completion for bash only worked for top-level commands, not for subcommands, flags, args, etc. This bug was due to an unnoticed behavior change in an imported library 🤦‍♂️. It's now fixed, and tests have been added.

Changed

• Shell completion now initially suggests only sources within the active group. Previously, all sources were suggested, potentially flooding the user with irrelevant suggestions. However, if the user continues to input a source handle that is outside the active group, completion will suggest all matching sources. This behavior is controlled via the new config option shell-completion.group-filter.

This is a tiny bugfix release for a runtime issue on some Linux distros. See the previous v0.47.0 release for recent headline features.

Fixed

• sq panicked on some Linux distros that don't include timezone data (tzdata). It's now explicitly imported.

This is a significant release, focused on improving i/o, responsiveness, and performance. The headline features are caching of ingested data for document sources such as CSV or Excel, and download caching for remote document sources. There are a lot of under-the-hood changes, so please open an issue if you encounter any weirdness.

Added

• Long-running operations (such as data ingestion, or file download) now result in a progress bar being displayed. Display of the progress bar is controlled by the new config options progress and progress.delay. You can also use the --no-progress flag to disable the progress bar.
  • 👉 The progress bar is rendered on stderr and is always zapped from the terminal when command output begins. It won't corrupt the output.
• #307: Ingested document sources (such as CSV or Excel) now make use of an ingest cache DB. Previously, ingestion of document source data occurred on each sq command. It is now a one-time cost; subsequent use of the document source utilizes the cache DB. Until, that is, the source document changes: then the ingest cache DB is invalidated and ingested again. This is a significantly improved experience for large document sources.
• There are several new commands to interact with the cache (although you shouldn't need to):
  • sq cache enable and sq cache disable control cache usage. You can also instead use the new ingest.cache config option.
  • sq cache clear clears the cache.
  • sq cache location prints the cache location on disk.
  • sq cache stat shows stats about the cache.
  • sq cache tree shows a tree view of the cache.
• #24: The download mechanism for remote document sources (e.g. a CSV file at https://sq.io/testdata/actor.csv) has been completely overhauled. Previously, sq would re-download the remote file on every command. Now, the remote file is downloaded and cached locally. Subsequent sq invocations check for staleness of the cached download, and re-download if necessary.
• As part of the download revamp, new config options have been introduced:
  • http.request.timeout is the timeout for the initial response from the server, and http.response.timeout is the timeout for reading the entire response body. We separate these two timeouts because it's possible that the server responds quickly, but then for a large file, the download takes too long.
  • https.insecure-skip-verify controls whether HTTPS connections verify the server's certificate. This is useful for remote files served with a self-signed certificate.
  • download.cache controls whether remote files are cached locally.
  • download.refresh.ok-on-err controls whether sq should continue with a stale cached download if an error occurred while trying to refresh the download. This is a sort of "Airplane Mode" for remote document sources: sq continues with the cached download when the network is unavailable.
• There are two more new config options introduced as part of the above work.
  • cache.lock.timeout controls the time that sq will wait for a lock on the cache DB. The cache lock is introduced for when you have multiple sq commands running concurrently, and you want to avoid them stepping on each other.
  • Similarly, config.lock.timeout controls the timeout for acquiring the (newly-introduced) lock on sq's config file. This helps prevent issues with multiple sq processes mutating the config concurrently.
• sq's own logs previously outputted in JSON format. Now there's a new log.format config option that permits setting the log format to json or text. The text format is more human-friendly, and is now the default.

Changed

• Ingestion performance for json and jsonl sources has been significantly improved.

Fixed

• Opening a DB connection now correctly honors conn.open-timeout.

Fixed

• sq sometimes failed to read from stdin if piped input was slowto arrive. This is now fixed.

Added

• #338: While sq has had group_by for some time, somehow the having mechanism was never implemented. That's fixed.

  $ sq '.payment | .customer_id, sum(.amount) | group_by(.customer_id) | having(sum(.amount) > 200)'
  customer_id  sum(.amount)
  526          221.55
  148          216.54
  

• #340: The group_by function now has a synonym gb, and order_by now has synonym ob. These synonyms are experimental 🧪. The motivation is to reduce typing, especially the underscore (_) in both function names, but it's not clear that the loss of clarity is worth it. Maybe synonyms group and order might be better? Feedback welcome.

  # Previously
  $ sq '.payment | .customer_id, sum(.amount) | group_by(.customer_id) | order_by(.customer_id)'
  
  # Now
  $ sq '.payment | .customer_id, sum(.amount) | gb(.customer_id) | ob(.customer_id)'
  

• #340: sq inspect: added flag shorthand -C for --catalogs and -S for --schemata. These were the only inspect flags without shorthand.

Changed

• #335: Previously, sq didn't handle decimal values correctly. It basically shoved a decimal value into a float or string and hoped for the best. As is known, floats are imprecise, and so we saw unwanted behavior, e.g.

  db_type_test.go:194: 
        Error Trace:	D:/a/sq/sq/drivers/sqlite3/db_type_test.go:194
        Error:      	Not equal: 
                      expected: "77.77"
                      actual  : "77.77000000000001"
  

  Now, sq uses a dedicated Decimal type end-to-end. No precision is lost, and at the output end, the value is rendered with the correct precision.

  There is a proposal to add decimal support to the Go database/sql package. If that happens, sq will happily switch to that mechanism.

  • 👉 A side effect of decimal support is that some output formats may now render decimal values differently (i.e. correctly). In particular, Excel output should now render decimals as a number (as opposed to a string), and with the precision defined in the database. Previously, a database NUMERIC(10,5) value might have been rendered as 100.00, but will now accurately render 100.00000.

Added

• New SLQ function rownum() that returns the one-indexed row number of the current record.

  $ sq '.actor | rownum(), .actor_id, .first_name | order_by(.first_name)'
  rownum()  actor_id  first_name
  1         71        ADAM
  2         132       ADAM
  3         165       AL
  

• sq inspect has two new flags:

  • --schemata: list the source's schemas

    $ sq inspect @sakila/pg12 --schemata -y
    - schema: information_schema
      catalog: sakila
      owner: sakila
    - schema: public
      catalog: sakila
      owner: sakila
      active: true
    

  • --catalogs: list the source's catalogs

    $ sq inspect @sakila/pg12 --catalogs
    CATALOG
    postgres
    sakila
    

Fixed

• sq version now honors option format.datetime when outputting build timestamp.
• Fixed a fairly nasty bug that prevented correct rendering of SLQ functions nested inside an expression.

Changed

• The --exec and --query flags for sq sql were removed in the preceding release (v0.43.1).

  That was probably a bit hasty, especially because it's possible those flags could be reintroduced when the query vs exec situation is figured out. So, those two flags are now restored, in that their use won't cause an error, but they've been hidden from command help, and remain no-op.

Added

• Related to #270, the output of sq inspect now includes the source's catalog (in JSON and YAML output formats).

Fixed

• MySQL driver didn't populate all expected values for sq inspect --overview.

Changed

• ☢️ Removed unused --exec and --query flags from sq sql command.

Fixed

• #308: Fix to allow build on 32-bit systems. Thanks @icp.

Added

• 🐥 #279: The SQLite driver now has initial support for several SQLite extensions baked in, including Virtual Table and FTS5. Note that this is an early access release of extensions support. Please open an issue if you discover something bad.

Fixed

• sq version was missing a newline in its output.

This release is heavily focused on improvements to Microsoft Excel support.

The underlying Excel library has been changed from tealeg/xlsx to qax-os/excelize, largely because tealeg/xlsx is no longer actively maintained.

Thus, both the XLSX output writer and the XLSX driver have been rewritten. There should be some performance improvements, but it's also possible that the rewrite introduced bugs. If you discover anything strange, please open an issue.

Added

• #99: The CSV and XLSX
  drivers can now handle duplicate header column names in the ingest data.
  For example, given a CSV file:

  actor_id,first_name,actor_id
  1,PENELOPE,1
  2,NICK,2
  

  The columns will be renamed to:

  actor_id,first_name,actor_id_1
  

  The renaming behavior is controlled by a new option ingest.column.rename
  This new option is effectively the ingest counterpart of the existing output option
  result.column.rename.

• #191: The XLSX driver now detects header rows, like
  the CSV driver already does. Thus, you now typically don't need to specify
  the --ingest.header flag for Excel files. However, the option remains available
  in case sq can't figure it out for a particular file.

• The Excel writer has three new config options for controlling date/time output.
  Note that these format strings are distinct from format.datetime
  and friends, because Excel has its own format string mechanism.

  • format.excel.datetime: Controls datetime format, e.g. 2023-08-03 16:07:01.
  • format.excel.date: Controls date-only format, e.g. 2023-08-03.
  • format.excel.time: Controls time-only format, e.g. 4:07 pm.

• The ingest kind detectors (e.g. for CSV or XLSX)
  now detect more date & time formats as kind.Datetime, kind.Date, and kind.Time.

• If an error occurs when the output format is text, a stack trace is printed
  to stderr when the command is executed with --verbose (-v).

• There's a new option error.format that controls error output format independent
  of the main format option . The error.format value must be one of text or json.

Changed

• ☢️ The default Excel date format has changed. Previously
  the format was 11/9/89, and now it is 1989-11-09. The same applies
  to datetimes, e.g. 11/9/1989 00:00:00 becomes 1989-11-09 00:00.

  This change is made to reduce ambiguity and confusion.
  sq uses a library
  to interact with Excel files, and it seems that the library chooses a particular format
  by default (11/9/89). There are several paths we could take here:

  1. Interrogate the OS, and use the OS locale date format.
  2. Stick with the library default 11/9/89.
  3. Pick a default other than 11/9/89.

  We pick the third option. The first option (locale-dependent)
  is excluded because, as a general rule, we want sq to produce the same
  output regardless of locale/system settings. We exclude the second option
  because month/day confuses most of the world. Thus, we're left with picking a
  default, and 1989-11-09 is the format used in
  RFC3339 and friends.

  Whether this is the correct (standard?) approach is still unclear, and
  feedback is welcome. However, the user can make use of the new config options
  (format.excel.datetime etc.)
  to customize the format as they see fit.

• The XLSX writer now outputs header rows in bold text.

• ☢️ The XLSX writer now outputs blob (bytes) cell data as a base64-encoded string,
  instead of raw bytes.

Fixed

• Fixed bug where source-specific config wasn't being propagated.

This release features a complete overhaul of the join mechanism.

Added

• #277: A table selector can now have an alias. This in and of itself is not
  particularly useful, but it's a building block for multiple joins.

  $ sq '@sakila | .actor:a | .a.first_name'
  

• New option result.column.rename that exposes a template used to rename
  result set column names before display. The primary use case is to de-duplicate
  columns names on a SELECT * FROM tbl1 JOIN tbl2, where tbl1 and tbl2
  have clashing column names (docs).

• #157: Previously only join (INNER JOIN) was available: now the rest of
  the join types such as left_outer_join, cross_join, etc. are
  implemented (docs).

Changed

• ☢️ #12: The table join mechanism has been
  completely overhauled. Now there's support for multiple joins. See docs.

  # Previously, only a single join was possible
  $ sq '.actor, .film_actor | join(.actor_id)'
  
  # Now, an arbitrary number of joins
  $ sq '.actor | join(.film_actor, .actor_id) | join(.film, .film_id)'
  

• ☢️ The alias for --jsonl (JSON Lines) has been changed to -J.

Fixed

• Fixed bug where config options weren't being propagated correctly.

Fixed

• Bug with sq version output on Windows.