wangzhengbo / dsq

Commandline tool for running SQL queries against JSON, CSV, Excel, Parquet, and more.

Commandline tool for running SQL queries against JSON, CSV, Excel, Parquet, and more.

This is a CLI companion to DataStation (a GUI) for running SQL queries against data files. So if you want the GUI version of this, check out DataStation.

Install

Binaries for amd64 (x86_64) are provided for each release.

macOS, Linux

On macOS or Linux, you can run the following:

$ curl -LO "https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq/releases/download/0.4.0/dsq-$(uname -s | awk '{ print tolower($0) }')-x64-0.4.0.zip"
$ unzip -f dsq-*-0.4.0.zip
$ sudo mv dsq /usr/local/bin/dsq

Or install manually from the releases page, unzip and add dsq to your $PATH.

Windows

Download the latest Windows release, unzip it, and add dsq to your $PATH.

Manual

If you are on another platform or architecture or want to grab the latest release, you can do so with Go 1.17+:

$ go install github.com/multiprocessio/dsq@latest

Usage

You can either pipe data to dsq or you can pass a file name to it.

If you are passing a file, it must have the usual extension for its content type.

For example:

$ dsq testdata.json "SELECT * FROM {} WHERE x > 10"

Or:

$ dsq testdata.ndjson "SELECT name, AVG(time) FROM {} GROUP BY name ORDER BY AVG(time) DESC"

Pretty print

By default dsq prints ugly JSON. This is the most efficient mode.

$ dsq testdata/userdata.parquet 'select count(*) from {}'
[{"count(*)":1000}
]

If you want prettier JSON you can pipe dsq to jq.

$ dsq testdata/userdata.parquet 'select count(*) from {}' | jq
[
  {
    "count(*)": 1000
  }
]

Or you can enable pretty printing with -p or --pretty in dsq which will display your results in an ASCII table.

$ ./dsq --pretty testdata/userdata.parquet 'select count(*) from {}'
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|     1000 |
+----------+

Piping data to dsq

When piping data to dsq you need to set the -s flag and specify the file extension or MIME type.

For example:

$ cat testdata.csv | dsq -s csv "SELECT * FROM {} LIMIT 1"

Or:

$ cat testdata.parquet | dsq -s parquet "SELECT COUNT(1) FROM {}"

Multiple files and joins

You can pass multiple files to DSQ. As long as they are supported data files in a valid format, you can run SQL against all files as tables. Each table can be accessed by the string {N} where N is the 0-based index of the file in the list of files passed on the commandline.

For example this joins two datasets of differing origin types (CSV and JSON).

$ dsq testdata/join/users.csv testdata/join/ages.json \
  "select {0}.name, {1}.age from {0} join {1} on {0}.id = {1}.id"
[{"age":88,"name":"Ted"},
{"age":56,"name":"Marjory"},
{"age":33,"name":"Micah"}]

You can also give file-table-names aliases since dsq uses standard SQL:

$ dsq testdata/join/users.csv testdata/join/ages.json \
  "select u.name, a.age from {0} u join {1} a on u.id = a.id"
[{"age":88,"name":"Ted"},
{"age":56,"name":"Marjory"},
{"age":33,"name":"Micah"}]

Transforming data to JSON without querying

As a shorthand for dsq testdata.csv "SELECT * FROM {}" to convert supported file types to JSON you can skip the query and the converted JSON will be dumped to stdout.

For example:

$ dsq testdata.csv
[{...some csv data...},{...some csv data...},...]

Nested object values

It's easiest to show an example. Let's say you have the following JSON file called user_addresses.json:

[
  {"name": "Agarrah", "location": {"city": "Toronto", "address": { "number": 1002 }}},
  {"name": "Minoara", "location": {"city": "Mexico City", "address": { "number": 19 }}},
  {"name": "Fontoon", "location": {"city": "New London", "address": { "number": 12 }}}
]

You can query the nested fields like so:

$ dsq user_addresses.json 'SELECT name, "location.city" FROM {}'

And if you need to disambiguate the table:

$ dsq user_addresses.json 'SELECT name, {}."location.city" FROM {}'

Nested objects explained

Nested objects are collapsed and their new column name becomes the JSON path to the value connected by .. Actual dots in the path must be escaped with a backslash. Since . is a special character in SQL you must quote the whole new column name.

Limitation: nested arrays

Nested objects within arrays are still ignored/dropped by dsq. So if you have data like this:

[
  {"field1": [1]},
  {"field1": [2]},
]

You cannot access any data within field1. You will need to preprocess your data with some other tool.

Limitation: whole object retrieval

You cannot query whole objects, you must ask for a specific path that results in a scalar value.

For example in the user_addresses.json example above you CANNOT do this:

$ dsq user_addresses.json 'SELECT name, {}."location" FROM {}'

Because location is not a scalar value. It is an object.

Supported Data Types

Name	File Extension(s)	Mime Type	Notes
CSV	csv	text/csv
TSV	tsv, tab	text/tab-separated-values
JSON	json	application/json	Must be an array of objects.
Newline-delimited JSON	ndjson, jsonl	application/jsonlines
Concatenated JSON	cjson	application/jsonconcat
Parquet	parquet	parquet
Excel	xlsx, xls	application/vnd.ms-excel	Currently only works if there is only one sheet.
ODS	ods	application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet	Currently only works if there is only one sheet.
Apache Error Logs	NA	text/apache2error	Currently only works if being piped in.
Apache Access Logs	NA	text/apache2access	Currently only works if being piped in.
Nginx Access Logs	NA	text/nginxaccess	Currently only works if being piped in.

Engine

Under the hood dsq uses DataStation as a library and under that hood DataStation uses SQLite to power these kinds of SQL queries on arbitrary (structured) data.

Comparisons

Name	Link	Supported File Types	Engine
q	http://harelba.github.io/q/	CSV, TSV	SQLite
textql	https://github.com/dinedal/textql	CSV, TSV	SQLite
octoql	https://github.com/cube2222/octosql	JSON, CSV, Excel, Parquet	Custom engine
dsq	Here	CSV, TSV, a few variations of JSON, Parquet, Excel, ODS (OpenOffice Calc), Logs	SQLite

And many other similar tools: sqlite-utils, csvq, trdsql.

Community

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License

This software is licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.