Malloy views

[MaxHalford]

Mallow is an expressive query language for data processing. It would we so cool to have it working alongside regular SQL views and Python views. Technically, this would only be a new MallowView class in the views module. Then, each client could execute the SQL compiled by Malloy.

[MaxHalford]

prql looks interesting too

[LeonardoNatale]

"Malloy currently works with SQL databases BigQuery, Postgres, and querying Parquet and CSV via DuckDB." (source)

Meaning we wouldn't be able interact with a local database file such as jaffle_shop.db

[MaxHalford]

But wouldn't it work if we just used Malloy as a translation layer to generate SQL?

[LeonardoNatale]

But wouldn't it work if we just used Malloy as a translation layer to generate SQL?

After playing a bit with their python package, I couldn't manage to just translate from MALLOY to SQL without having to load a specific source at the time of the conversion.

To be more specific, the method runtime.get_sql works only with an open connection to either BigQuery, Postgres or a Parquet / CSV file. I couldn't just translate the syntax with something like get_sql(query=malloy_query, dialect="duckdb")

But I might be missing something.

[MaxHalford]

Right, I see. Difficult to know if this is by design on Mallory's side or not.

Is this blocking? Don't we almost have a client available/open when we parse views?

[LeonardoNatale]

It might not be blocking for GoogleQuery. But it's blocking for DuckDB MotherDuck as they just support CSV and Parquet files through DuckDB