I'm trying to push the boundaries of SQL by building Anyquery[1]. It's a SQL query engine that allows you to run queries on anything (GitHub, Todoist, Parquet, Google Sheets, logs, emails, etc.)
It's mental gymnastics to transform different data sources (e.g. a spreadsheet) into a SQL database with write support, but I do enjoy the journey and learn a lot from it.
Hey HN, I’m Julien, a CS student, and I built anyquery, a SQL query engine for pretty much anything.
Anyquery can run SQL queries on local/remote files (CSV, JSON, Parquet, HTML, etc.) and SaaS (GitHub, Notion, TodoIst, Shopify, etc.). Anyquery can also transform a Google Sheets or an Airtable base into a SQL database with INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE support. Additionally, it can act as a MySQL server to leverage its ecosystem (BI tools, ORMs, etc.). Finally, you can run PRQL and PQL (KQL inspired language) queries with it.
Under the hood, it uses Go and SQLite's virtual tables. Therefore, you can use the SQLite ecosystem (e.g. sqlite-vec, datasette, etc.)
I would love to hear your feedback about the project.
(I know it’s a repost. I thought that posting the previous SHOW HN during the weekend was badly timed. If you find it inappropriate, please don’t hesitate to flag the post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41203559)
Hey Breck, I'm not sure you understood properly what Anyquery is. It's a CLI to run SQL queries on "anything" (APIs mostly and files). Therefore, it's hard to provide a version without downloading anything.
But I guess it's because the landing page isn't clear enough. Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to fix that.
Thanks! For querying CSV, it's quite similar to DuckDB (just a little bit slower). It's almost the same syntax (read_csv table, same parameter name, etc.)
I think anyquery strength rather comes from querying things other than files
France did something like that last month. To support the "Centre national de la musique", a new 1.2% tax was added on digital music streaming services. But rather than absorbing the cost, Spotify just raised its subscription cost.
In the end, the government just taxes its citizens more instead of getting a bigger share of revenue from these companies.
It's inspired by Kusto and available as an open-source CLI. I've made it compatible with SQLite in one of my tools, and it's refreshing to use.
An example: