Introduction to LangChain: Make AI Smarter and Easier to use

Overview

DuckDB is a seriously powerful database, with a host of unique and amazing features that are straight from the world of academic database research. It’s a fast in-process analytical database that can handle large datasets and perform complex queries. It’s free, open-source, and written in C++ and SQL. It supports to run on Linux, macOS, Windows, and all popular hardware architectures.

Features

A few of key features for blazing fast OLAP query performance on large datasets (involving aggregations and joins on 100M+ rows on multiple tables), are listed below.

• Like other OLAP data warehouses, DuckDB uses columnar storage, which is a great fit for analytical workloads, because it allows for fast, efficient scans over large amounts of data
• Uses vectorized query execution, which is a technique that allows for processing large amounts of data in batches.
• Uses concurrent execution via threads, which allows for faster execution of queries, and is a great fit for modern multi-threaded CPUs.
• Offers a rich SQL dialect. It can read and write file formats such as CSV, Excel, Parquet, and JSON, to and from the local file system and remote endpoints such as S3 buckets.
• Supports integration with popular database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite.
• Data can very easily move from a DuckDB table to a Pandas or Polars DataFrame, and vice-versa.
• It also offers connectors that allow users to directly read Parquet data from AWS S3, GCS and Azure storage.

A productive DuckDB setup for large (100M+ size) analytical workloads

Installation

As Software

DuckDB can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can be installed using a package manager, or by downloading the source code and building it manually. You can refer to the official documentation for installation instructions.

As Library

DuckDB not only as tools or software on system. It also supports as a library that can be used in other applications, as a part of a larger application, or as a standalone database. It can be used in Python, Node.js, R, Java, C++, and other programming languages.

Python

pip install duckdb --upgrade

Node.js

npm install duckdb

Java

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.duckdb</groupId>
    <artifactId>duckdb_jdbc</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Usage

Supports Various File Formats

For the DuckDB usage, below is using Python as an example.

import duckdb
duckdb.read_csv("example.csv")                # read a CSV file into a Relation
duckdb.read_parquet("example.parquet")        # read a Parquet file into a Relation
duckdb.read_json("example.json")              # read a JSON file into a Relation

duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM 'example.csv'")     # directly query a CSV file
duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM 'example.parquet'") # directly query a Parquet file
duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM 'example.json'")    # directly query a JSON file

duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").write_parquet("out.parquet") # Write to a Parquet file
duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").write_csv("out.csv")         # Write to a CSV file
duckdb.sql("COPY (SELECT 42) TO 'out.parquet'")      # Copy to a Parquet file

duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").fetchall()   # Python objects
duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").df()         # Pandas DataFrame
duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").pl()         # Polars DataFrame
duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").arrow()      # Arrow Table
duckdb.sql("SELECT 42").fetchnumpy() # NumPy Arrays

Supports Multiple Data Sources

It also supports various data sources, including local files, S3 buckets, and remote endpoints.

SELECT AVG(trip_distance) FROM 's3://yellow_tripdata_20[12]*.parquet'
SELECT * FROM '~/local/files/file.parquet'
SELECT * FROM 'https://shell.duckdb.org/data/tpch/0_01/parquet/lineitem.parquet'

Pandas DataFrames

DuckDB can even treat pandas dataframes as DuckDB tables and query them directly.

import pandas as pd
import duckdb

mydf = pd.DataFrame({'a' : [1, 2, 3]})
print(duckdb.query("SELECT sum(a) FROM mydf;").fetchall())

Retional API

It also supports retional API for querying data, which allows for filtering, grouping, and aggregating data.

import duckdb
rel = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM range(1_000_000) tbl(id)")
duckdb.sql("SELECT sum(id) FROM rel").show()

# aggregate(expr, groups = {})
rel = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM range(1_000_000) tbl(id)")
rel.aggregate("id % 2 AS g, sum(id), min(id), max(id)")

# except_(rel)
r1 = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM range(10) tbl(id)")
r2 = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM range(5) tbl(id)")
r1.except_(r2).show()

# filter(condition)
rel = duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM range(1_000_000) tbl(id)")
rel.filter("id > 5").limit(3).show()

# there are more operations available, refer to the documentation for more details.

Result Output

DuckDB query result output can be saved on local file system by using below methods.

• write_csv
• write_parquet

Persistence

The data also can be persistent on disk as *.db file. The duckdb.connect(dbname) creates a connection to a persistent database. Any data written to that connection will be persisted, and can be reloaded by reconnecting to the same file, both from Python and from other DuckDB clients.

import duckdb

# create a connection to a file called 'file.db'
con = duckdb.connect("file.db")
# create a table and load data into it
con.sql("CREATE TABLE test (i INTEGER)")
con.sql("INSERT INTO test VALUES (42)")
# query the table
con.table("test").show()
# explicitly close the connection
con.close()
# Note: connections also closed implicitly when they go out of scope

Or using context manager to automatically close the connection.

import duckdb

with duckdb.connect("file.db") as con:
    con.sql("CREATE TABLE test (i INTEGER)")
    con.sql("INSERT INTO test VALUES (42)")
    con.table("test").show()
    # the context manager closes the connection automatically

Conclusion

DuckDB is a great database for analytical workloads, with a rich SQL dialect, fast vectorized query execution, and support for various file formats. It’s also easy to use as a library in other applications, and can be used as a standalone database. Happy to try!