Rusty Conover
Data infrastructure engineer and founder of Query.Farm. Building DuckDB extensions, scaling data platforms, and writing about what I learn along the way.
Recent Activity
View all →Rusty had a busy day maintaining and updating the DuckDB ecosystem, with particular focus on the community extensions and addressing build issues in the core DuckDB library.
Rusty spent the day working on query optimization and join semantics in the DuckDB codebase. Over 23 commits, he refined critical logic in the join execution path.
Rusty focused on join elimination optimization in DuckDB, tackling a feature to improve query performance when joins can be safely removed based on primary key and uniqueness constraints.
GeoSilo vs GeoArrow + Byte Stream Split: Two Approaches to Geometry Compression
A detailed comparison of GeoSilo's delta-integer encoding against GeoArrow's columnar float64 layout with Parquet BYTE_STREAM_SPLIT, covering compression ratios, precision tradeoffs, and when each approach wins.
VGI Injector: A Tiny HTTPS Download-and-Execute Binary in Zig
I needed a self-contained binary that downloads a program over HTTPS and exec's it — small enough to run in a FROM scratch container with nothing else. Go and Rust couldn't get small enough. Zig could.
TIME Data Type Compatibility Across Databases
A survey of the TIME data type across 14 databases, comparing supported ranges, maximum values, and whether the special value 24:00:00 is accepted.
Telemetry for DuckDB Extensions Without the Pain
I open-sourced the telemetry client I use across Query.Farm's DuckDB extensions. It's two files, one function call, and it only collects platform and version info.
Releasing vgi-rpc: An RPC Framework Built on Apache Arrow
I built an RPC framework for Python that uses Apache Arrow IPC as the wire format and Python Protocol classes as the interface definition. No .proto files, no codegen — just type annotations.
Acronym-Aware Case Conversions in the DuckDB Inflector Extension
The Inflector extension for DuckDB now supports configurable acronyms, so case conversions preserve terms like HTML, API, and URL as fully uppercase — configured through a native DuckDB setting.
DuckDB Extension Development Workshop
DuckDB Developer Meeting #1 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
Building on Flight: Real-World Lessons from the DuckDB Airport Extension
Apache Arrow Summit 2025 — Paris, France
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been deep in ecosystem stewardship across DuckDB and Apache Arrow, juggling infrastructure upgrades, cross-language contributions, and community extension gardening across multiple fronts. February's highlights included spearheading DuckDB 1.5 compatibility across 40+ extensions, shipping a complete production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in four languages, and contributing upstream enhancements to Arrow that fixed silent data corruption in RecordBatch serialization. Beyond the open-source work, I've maintained steady progress on several classified initiatives that demonstrate the breadth of systems I'm architecting.
- Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility crusade across Query-farm's extension portfolio, standardizing documentation and future-proofing
airport,shellfs,webmacro,inflector, and two dozen others - Contributed upstream Arrow enhancements across JavaScript, Swift, Rust, and Go for custom metadata support and dictionary serialization, addressing production data integrity issues
- Shipped production vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding, Cloudflare documentation, and complete implementations across Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript