harelba/q

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10361 stars · 424 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

q is a Python command-line tool that lets you run SQL queries directly on delimited text files (CSV/TSV) and multi-file sqlite3 databases, treating files as database tables. It supports full SQL constructs, automatic column/type detection, and optional caching that dramatically speeds up repeated queries.

Use cases

• run SQL queries on csv files from the command line
• query tsv files with SQL without loading into a database
• join data across multiple sqlite database files
• analyze command output piped into SQL, like ps -ef
• count and group rows in large delimited files quickly
• ad-hoc data analysis on text files without ETL

When to choose

• you want SQL power over CSV/TSV files without importing them into a database
• you need to query multiple sqlite databases in a single statement
• you do quick ad-hoc analysis in shell scripts or pipelines

When to avoid

• you need a persistent relational database with indexes and concurrent writes
• you work with nested or binary data formats like JSON or Parquet
• you need very large-scale analytics better suited to Spark or DuckDB

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

cli database csv search-engine developer-tools data-science files windows python cli sql text-as-data tsv sqlite data-analysis command-line-tool command-line linux macos

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