#387 Heralding in a new era of database queries

Topics covered in this episode:

• Dataherald
• Python's many command-line utilities
• Distroless Python
• functools.cache, cachetools, and cachebox
• Extras
• Joke

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About the show

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• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org
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Michael #1: Dataherald

• Interact with your SQL database, Natural Language to SQL using LLMs.
• Allows you to set up an API from your database that can answer questions in plain English
• Uses include
  • Allow business users to get insights from the data warehouse without going through a data analyst
  • Enable Q+A from your production DBs inside your SaaS application
  • Create a ChatGPT plug-in from your proprietary data

Brian #2: Python's many command-line utilities

• Trey Hunner
• Too many to list, but here’s some fun ones
  • json.tool - nicely format json data
  • calendar - print the calendar
    • current by default, but you can pass in year and month
  • gzip, ftplib, tarfile, and other unixy things
    • handy on Windows
  • cProfile & pstats

Michael #3: Distroless Python

• via Patrick Smyth
• What is distroless anyway?
  • These are container images without package managers or shells included.
  • Debugging these images presents some wrinkles (can't just exec into a shell inside the image), but they're a lot more secure.
• Chainguard, creates low/no CVE distroless images based on our FOSS distroless OS, Wolfi.
• Some Python use-cases: docker run -it cgr.dev/chainguard/python:latest # The entrypoint is a Python REPL, since no b/a/sh is included docker run -it cgr.dev/chainguard/python:latest-dev # This is their dev version and has pip, bash, apk, etc.

Brian #4: functools.cache, cachetools, and cachebox

• functools cache and lru_cache - built in
• cachetools - “This module provides various memoizing collections and decorators, including variants of the Python Standard Library's @lru_cache function decorator.”
• cachebox - “The fastest caching Python library written in Rust”

Extras

Brian:

• Python 3.12.4 is out
• VSCode has some pytest improvements

Michael:

• Time for a bartender alternative, I’ve switched to Ice.
• Rocket.chat as an alternative to Slack

Joke: CSS Cartoons