postgres_scanner VS go-duckdb

I've created an ODBC DuckDB extension to query any database that has an ODBC driver. It's modeled after the fantastic official Postgres scanner extension https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner.

It supports fetching rowsets in batches to minimize network overhead and defaults to the default DuckDB vector size of 2048.

I've tested it against the IBM DB2 & Postgres ODBC drivers and will continue to test and add support for all major databases. If you've got one you'd like to see let me know in the comments.

I've got plenty of improvements in the pipeline including:

It's not a dumb question at all. I'm pretty knowledgeable with DBs and still find it very difficult to understand how many of these front-end/pass-through engines work.

Checkout Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers. That might be the most well known approach for accessing one database through another. The Supabase team wrote an interesting piece about this recently.

https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-foreign-data-wrappers-rus...

You might also want to try out duckdb's approach to reading other DBs (or DB files). They talk about how they can "import" a sqlite DB in the above 0.7.0 announcement, but also have some other examples in their duckdblabs github project. Check out their "...-scanner" repos:

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

Doesn't postgres have a columnar option? If so, you could prob get better performance for your analytical interactions if you switched some tables to columnar.

Otherwise check out postgres scanner. https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner

DuckDB can actually read SQLite or Postgres directly! In the SQLite case, something like Litestream plus DuckDB could work really well!

Also, with Pyarrow's help, DuckDB can already do this with Delta tables!

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgresscanner

Interesting thought! I have not tried this yet so I only have a guess as an answer. Could you export the data as SQL statements and then run those statements on DuckDB? That may be easier to set up, but may take longer to run...

DuckDB also has the ability to read Postgres data directly, and there is a Postgres FDW that can read from DuckDB!

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgresscanner

https://github.com/alitrack/duckdb_fdw

DuckDB also has date functions and Go bindings

I've been beating my head trying to get duckdb to statically link into a Go program (I'm neither an expert with cgo nor ld). If anyone else has been able to do this I'd love to see your build steps.

https://github.com/marcboeker/go-duckdb produces a non-static binary by default.

Here is a solved Github Issue related to CGO for the Go bindings! If you have another issue, please feel free to post it on their Github page!

https://github.com/marcboeker/go-duckdb/issues/4

Yeah frankly the q benchmark isn't the best even though dsq compares favorably in it. It isn't well documented and exercises a very limited amount of functionality and isn't very rigorous from what I can see. That said, the caching q does is likely very solid (and not something dsq does).

The biggest risk I think with octosql (and cube2222 is here somewhere to disagree with me if I'm wrong) is that they have their own entire SQL engine whereas textql, q and dsq use SQLite. But q is also in Python whereas textql, octosql, and dsq are in Go.

In the next few weeks I'll be posting some benchmarks that I hope are a little fairer (or at least well-documented and reproducible). Though of course it would be appropriate to have independent benchmarks too since I now have a dog in the fight.

On a tangent, once the go-duckdb binding [0] matures I'd love to offer duckdb as an alternative engine flag within dsq (and DataStation). Would be neat to see.

[0] https://github.com/marcboeker/go-duckdb