#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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Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org
Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org
Show: @pythonbytes@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