duckdf VS JET.jl

Quite a while ago, when duckdb was just a duckling, I wrote an R package that supported direct manipulation of R dataframes using SQL.[1] duckdb was the engine for this.

The approach was never as fast as data.table but did approach the speed of dplyr for more complex queries.

Life had other things in store for me and I haven’t touched this library for a while now.

At the time there was no Julia connector for duckdb, but now that there is, I’d like to try this approach in that language.

[1] https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf

Yeah, I agree sqldf is quite slow. Fair point.

As you've seen, duckdb registers an "R data frame as a virtual table." I'm not sure what they mean by "yet" either.

Of course it is possible to write an R dataframe to an on-disk duckdb table, if that's what you want to do.

There are some simple benchmarks on the bottom of the duckdf README[1]. Essentially I found for basic SQL SELECT queries, dplyr is quicker, but for much more complex queries, the duckdf/duckdb combination performs better.

If you really want speed of course, just use data.table.

[1] https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf

That's a really good point that I'd not really thought about. I'd never really considered the difference between calling just functions versus macros.

Thinking about Query.jl and DataFramesMeta.jl, and I am for sure not an expert in either, I can't specifically speak to your `head` example, but other base functions can be combined with macros. For example, see the LINQ examples from DataFramesMeta.jl[1] where `mean` is being used. Or again the LINQ style examples in Query.jl[2], where `descending` is used in the first example, or `length` later in the Grouping examples.

Is that the kind of thing you meant?

For whatever reason, with the way my brain is wired, the LINQ style of query just works for me. I have never directly used LINQ, but do have some SQL experience. In fact, I wrote some dinky little wrapper functions[3] around duckdb[4] so I could directly query R dataframes and datatables with SQL using that backend, rather than sqldf[5].

[1] https://juliadata.github.io/DataFramesMeta.jl/stable/#@linq-...

[2] https://www.queryverse.org/Query.jl/stable/linqquerycommands...

[3] https://github.com/phillc73/duckdf

[4] https://duckdb.org/

[5] https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/sqldf/index.html

An informative discussion on julia forum. Have you tried using https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl to minimize type instabilities?

For instance, https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl is still in its relative infancy, but it's played a big role in detecting quite a few potential bugs that had never been reported to use by users or caught in our testing infrastructure. There's also been a lot developments like interfaces to RR the time travelling debugger https://rr-project.org/ which helps us better understand and catch some very hard to debug non-deterministic bugs.

Have you seen Shuhei Tadowaki's work on JET.jl (?)

If you're curious: https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl

This may seem more about performance (than IDE development) but Shuhei is one of the driving contributors behind developing the capabilities to use compiler capabilities for IDE integration -- and indeed JET.jl contains the kernel of a number of these capabilities.

This is sort of being done right now, as dynamic languages have begun to adopt gradual typing... at least Python and Julia, that I know of.

If something like [JET.jl](https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl) become ubiquitous in Julia, one could add a function that pointed out all the places in the code where types are not fully inferred by the compiler.

It'll never be quite the same level of safety as a static language, however.

- Pattern matching (sometimes you don't want the overhead of a method lookup)

[1]: https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl

You can use the `@code_warntype` macro to check for type stability, which is very helpful for detecting such performance pitfalls on single function level. In the future, https://github.com/aviatesk/JET.jl may give a more powerful way to do it.