Comment by pdet
16 hours ago
DuckDB uses a speculative parallel CSV parsing technique. The basic idea is that the parser speculates about the state the CSV parser is in at a random byte (e.g., whether it is inside a quoted field) and tries to figure out where the next row starts based on that.There are validation steps during finalization as well, to ensure the parser did not got anything wrong in its speculation.
I've never gotten around to writing a blog post about it, but I go quite in-depth on the technique in this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrqSp8m7fmk
(Disclaimer: I'm the author of the blog post and also the developer who implemented the entire CSV parser in DuckDB.)
Burning my points to say dude that's sick, parsing CSVs is hell I am genuinely going to watch this thank you.
there isn't any upvote limit on HN.
No, but its genuinely looked down upon to make frivolous comments.
Thank you. I love using duckdb and frequently query directly from zstd compressed files (and write out new ones). They’re easy to inspect using visidata and make outer use of. I found the talk interesting and enjoyable.
You’re officially my hero, the duckdb csv parser is the fastest I could find and helped save a data project with hundreds of gigabytes of csv pain.
Thank you so much. I love DuckDB!
[flagged]