Python Bytes
Python Bytes
#technology

Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.

#387 Heralding in a new era of database queries

June 11, 2024 00:27:52 23.53 MB Downloads: 0
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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:

Michael:

Joke: CSS Cartoons