Hacker News Reader

Comment by mightybyte | Hacker News Reader

I'll second this. Clickhouse is amazing. I was actually using it today to query some CSV files. I had to refresh my memory on the syntax so if anyone is interested:

  clickhouse local -q "SELECT foo, sum(bar) FROM file('foobar.csv', CSV) GROUP BY foo FORMAT Pretty"

Way easier than opening in Excel and creating a pivot table which was my previous workflow.

Here's a list of the different input and output formats that it supports.

https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/interfaces/formats

View on HN

You don't even need to use file() for a lot of things recently. These just work with clickhouse local. Even wildcards work.

  select * from `foobar.csv`

  select * from `monthly-report-*.csv`

Ooh very nice, thanks for the tip!

Just had to try:

  $ function _select_aux () { clickhouse local -q "SELECT $* FORMAT Pretty" }
  $ alias SELECT='noglob _select_aux'
  $ SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM file('repos.json', JSON)
  ┏━━━━━━━┓
  ┃ count ┃
  ┡━━━━━━━┩
  │    30 │
  └───────┘

This is very nice!! I went down the format clause[1] rabbit hole a couple minutes ago and it looks like they have `FORMAT Markdown` as an option. FORMAT PrettySpaceNoEscapes also looks a bit better than Pretty or the default PrettyCompact imho

1. https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/interfaces/formats

Where's this noglob command coming from? I haven't heard of it before.

Ah sorry that is probably zsh specific, it makes sure to not glob expand * etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com