Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by louisvgchi 1879 days ago
As someone developing essentially a competitor to Excel-and-PowerQuery/M, I find all this very interesting.

My language is strict and statically typed. However, after arrays (tables are arrays of records conceptually) exceed a certain length, rather than processing them in-memory as arrays, they will be offloaded to storage and processed (transparently) in a streaming fashion.

I’m surprised that this doesn’t work well in PowerQuery. I would have thought that 100K would be peanuts for it.

Mine is a SaaS however, so the user’s laptop isn’t a constraint, and I can transparently throw a million records in BigQuery or some other data warehouse and use its aggregates if needed. Although at the 100K scale you can use SQLite and it can handle that scale of data trivially on commodity laptops.

So your experience is interesting indeed.

2 comments

Feel free to reach out via email if you want to follow up. My address is in my profile.

I'll note, as I did to a sibling reply of yours, I made observations about a specific pattern that showcases performance issues in PQ/M. PQ/M easily scales beyond 100Ks of records, but not for arbitrary processing patterns.

I'm skeptical. I want an example, because my experience differs.