It is a command line wrapper to generate a Pandas SF and save it as CSV (or the other way around)
First paragraph under that heading as a markdown error
which I hadn’t considered in [my previous post on compression algorithms]](/compression-algorithms-parquet/).Never seen any v1 in the wild.
- https://voltrondata.com/codex/a-new-frontier (links out to others) - https://wesmckinney.com/blog/looking-back-15-years/
in short you can think of a DB as at least 3 decoupled subsystems: UI, compute (query engine), storage. DuckDB has a query engine and storage format, and several UIs (SQL, Python, etc.). Trino is only a query engine (and UIs, everything has UIs). Polars has a query engine. DataFusion is a query engine (and other things). Spark is a query engine. pandas has a query engine
typically query engines are tightly coupled with the overall “product”, but increasingly compute, data (and even more recently via DuckLake metadata), and UI are decoupled allowing you to mix and match parts for a “decomposed database” architecture
quick disclaimer: I worked at Voltron Data but it’s a dead company walking, not trying to advertise for them by any means but the doc I linked is very well written with good information IMO
"Simple Binary Encoding" v2 has been stuck at release candidate stage for over 5 years and has flaws that mean it'll probably never be worth adopting.
Yes, it is a critique (or at least its user community). It's a critique that's 100% justified too.
Have we all been so conditioned by corporate training that we've lost the ability to say "hey, this sucks" when it _does_ in fact suck?
We all lose when people communicate unclearly. Here, the people holding back evolution of the format do need to be critiqued, and named, and shamed, and the author shouldn't have been so shy about doing it.
Take the RLE encoding which switches between run-length encoding and bit-packing. The way bit-packing has been implemented is to generate 74,000 lines of Java to read/write every combination of bitwidth, endianness and value-length.
I just can't believe this is optimal except in maybe very specific CPU-only cases (e.g. Parquet-Java running on a giant cluster somewhere).
If it were just bit-packing I could easily offload a whole data page to a GPU and not care about having per-bitwidth optimised implementations, but having to switch encodings at random intervals just makes this a headache.
It would be really nice if actual design documents exist that specify why this is a good idea based on real-world data patterns.
(slams gavel)
Parquet Court.
crmd•8h ago
The author was able to rollback his changes, but in some industries an unplanned enterprise-wide data unavailability event means the end of your career at that firm, if you don’t have a CYA email from the vendor confirming you were good to go. That CYA email, and the throat to choke, is why Oracle does 7 and 8 figure licensing deals with enterprises selling inferior software solutions versus open source options.
It seems that Linux, through Linus’ leadership, has been able to solve this risk issue and fully displace commercial UNIX operating systems. I hope many other projects up and down the stack can have the same success.
duncanfwalker•8h ago
crmd•7h ago
moelf•7h ago
3eb7988a1663•7h ago
moelf•7h ago
forinti•7h ago
Oracle is not imune to software issues. In fact, this year I lost two weekends because of a buggy upgrade on the cloud that left my production cluster in a failed state.
chrismustcode•6h ago
It’s a mammoth task for them to migrate
reactordev•6h ago
jtbaker•6h ago
billed
reactordev•5h ago
taneq•6h ago
1a527dd5•6h ago
atombender•6h ago
When the author is talking about rolling back his changes, it's not referring to a database, but a version of his library. If someone tried used his new version, I assume the only thing that would have gone wrong is that their code wouldn't work because Pandas didn't support the format.
This article is about how a new version of the Parquet format hasn't been widely adopted, and so now the Parquer community is in a split state where different forces are pulling the direction of the format in two directions, and this happens to be caused by two different areas of focus that don't need to be tightly coupled together.
I don't see how the problems the article discusses relate to the reliability of software.