neilotoole/sq

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2555 stars · 42 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

sq is a command-line data wrangling tool that provides jq-style querying over SQL databases and document formats like CSV, Excel, and JSON. It can join across sources, inspect schema metadata, diff tables/databases, and export or insert data in many formats.

Use cases

• query a postgres table with jq-like syntax from the command line
• join a csv file with a mysql database table
• import an excel worksheet into a postgres table
• export all database tables to csv files
• inspect database schema metadata as for use with jq
• diff two database tables or entire databases
• convert lines data into a sqlite table
• run native sql against sql server and insert results into sqlite

When to choose

• you want jq-style one-liner queries against databases or flat files
• you need to move or convert data between databases and document formats like csv or excel
• you want to inspect, compare, or document database schemas from the terminal
• you prefer a lightweight cli over heavyweight ETL tools

When to avoid

• you need a full GUI-based data pipeline or orchestration platform
• you need streaming or real-time data processing at scale
• your workflow requires complex transformations better suited to pandas or dbt

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

database cli etl data-science csv pdf databases developer-tools files cli windows cross-platform go data-wrangler sql jq-style-query excel xlsx cross-source-join slq database-diff data-export data-import data-engineering command-line macos linux docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="neilotoole/sq")