[shortrounddev2]

You should checkout powershell; it supports converting CSV into in-memory structured data and then you can run regular powershell queries on that data:

    $> csvData = @"
       Name,Department,Salary
       John Doe,IT,60000
       Jane Smith,Finance,75000
       Alice Johnson,HR,65000
       Bob Anderson,IT,71000
       "@;
    
    $> csvData
         | ConvertFrom-Csv
         | Select Name, Salary
         | Sort Salary -Descending
    
       Name          Salary
       ----          ------
       Jane Smith    75000
       Bob Anderson  71000
       Alice Johnson 65000
       John Doe      60000

You can also then convert the results back into CSV by piping into ConvertTo-Csv

    $> csvData
         | ConvertFrom-Csv
         | Select Name, Salary
         | Sort Salary -Descending
         | ConvertTo-Csv
         
       "Name","Salary"
       "Jane Smith","75000"
       "Bob Anderson","71000"
       "Alice Johnson","65000"
       "John Doe","60000"

[llimllib]

nushell does too:

    /tmp/> "Name,Department,Salary
    ::: John Doe,IT,60000
    ::: Jane Smith,Finance,75000
    ::: Alice Johnson,HR,65000
    ::: Bob Anderson,IT,71000" |
    :::     from csv | 
    :::     select Name Salary | 
    :::     sort-by -r Salary
    ╭───┬───────────────┬────────╮
    │ # │     Name      │ Salary │
    ├───┼───────────────┼────────┤
    │ 0 │ Jane Smith    │  75000 │
    │ 1 │ Bob Anderson  │  71000 │
    │ 2 │ Alice Johnson │  65000 │
    │ 3 │ John Doe      │  60000 │
    ╰───┴───────────────┴────────╯

[marzell]

for something a bit more robust, check out DuckDB. It's a library you can embed, use it to run SQL on local files as well as connect to databases, do joins, analytics, etc.

[scumola]

Agreed. The article mentioned duckdb and I'm her to thumbs-up the use of DuckDB wholeheartedly. If you like the world of public CSV files as data sources that you can query or cross-query, duckdb is the tool for you. Just follow the demo on the duckdb website and you'll be wow'd for sure.

[llimllib]

I use both, and I have found it helpful to have nushell around when munging csv and parquet files, even when working with duckdb - I find it quicker to ask for the first few rows of a thing or do simple stuff with it, then deeper analysis with duckdb.

They're a powerful pairing

[shortrounddev2]

Crazy how similar the commands are.

[rzmk]

qsv (https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv) also has a sqlp command which lets you run Polars SQL queries on CSV(s).

Here I'll:

  - Send the csv data from stdin (using echo and referred to in the command by -)
  - Refer to the data in the query by stdin. You may also use the _t_N syntax (first table is _t_1, then _t_2, etc.), or the file name itself before the .csv extension if we were using files.
  - Pipe the output to the table command for formatting.
  - Also, the shape of the result is printed to stderr (the (4, 2) below).

  $ echo 'Name,Department,Salary
    John Doe,IT,60000
    Jane Smith,Finance,75000
    Alice Johnson,HR,65000
    Bob Anderson,IT,71000' |
    qsv sqlp - 'SELECT Name, Salary FROM stdin ORDER BY Salary DESC' |
    qsv table
    
    (4, 2)
    Name           Salary
    Jane Smith     75000
    Bob Anderson   71000
    Alice Johnson  65000
    John Doe       60000

[smooc]

You do realize that this happened also on the article? I.e. In memory and autoinference