Excel
Publishing Database Results to a Sheet Automatically
Publish database results to a Google Sheet on a schedule: replace a range safely, mark it generated, stamp the update time and alert on failure.
8 min read
Library
Everything you need to level up your coding skills.
CSV
Exporting CSV From the Database Straight to a Gzip File
Pipe a PostgreSQL export into gzip or zstd: 130 MB became 42 MB in 4.6 s, with six settings compared and the pipeline that exits 0 after a failed export.
8 min read
XML
Summing Values Across Thousands of XML Invoices by Currency
Total 5,000 XML invoice files in under a second with Python, xmlstarlet or grep, group by currency, and catch malformed files and missing totals.
6 min read
CSV
Writing Dates and Booleans to CSV That Others Can Read
One timestamp exported as 09:30+00, 16:30+07 and 04:30-05, and dd.mm.yyyy that pandas read as 3 January. Fix dates and booleans in the query, not the session.
9 min read
Excel
Query Function in Sheets Versus SQL and What Maps to What
Compare the Google Sheets QUERY function with SQL: select, where, group by, order by, label and limit side by side, what QUERY lacks, and when to use which.
7 min read
JSON
Compressing JSON Lines for Storage and Reading Them Back
Compare gzip, zstd and xz on a 36 MB JSON Lines file for size and speed, and read the result back with jq, DuckDB, pandas and Python without unpacking.
6 min read
CSV
Exporting Large Tables to CSV Without Running Out of Memory
Export a 2,000,000 row table to CSV six ways: peak memory ranged from 11 MB to 2 GB, time from 1.6 s to 14 s. fetchall and pandas are the ones that run out.
9 min read
XMLGuide
Answering Questions From XML Data With Counts and Joins
A method for turning an XML file into answers: inspect its shape, extract the fields once, check counts and totals, join carefully and record the result.
17 min read
YAML
Finding Inconsistent Versions Across YAML Configs in a Repo
Find image versions that disagree across Compose, CI, Helm and Kubernetes files in one pass: postgres in five tags, redis in three and latest in three files.
6 min read
Excel
Using the Sheets API From Python to Read and Write Data
Use the Google Sheets API from Python: create a service account, share the sheet, read and write ranges in batches, set value options and handle quota errors.
7 min read
CSV
Exporting a CSV With Headers From SQLite on the Command Line
Export SQLite to CSV with a header row from the sqlite3 shell: CRLF endings by default, NULL against empty string, types and 2,000,000 rows in 3.5 s.
10 min read
PostgreSQL
Comparing PostgreSQL Plans Before and After a Change
Compare PostgreSQL query plans before and after a change: capture both, control cache and noise, line up nodes and decide if the gain is real or warm cache.
7 min read
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