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 →## DuckDB Testing Infrastructure
Today focused on community engagement with the Apache Arrow project. Rusty replied to issue #49744 on apache/arrow, which addresses inconsistent skips in datagen functionality. The issue involves integration and format concerns, suggesting work around data generation tooling and how skip behavior is handled inconsistently across different scenarios. By providing feedback on this integration issue, he contributed to the ongoing effort to improve Arrow's data generation and testing infrastructure.
DuckDB Community Extensions: Rusty completed a maintenance cycle across multiple community extensions, bumping versions for airport, datasketches, bitfilters, geosilo, textplot, and lindel. This work was followed by six corresponding PRs on duckdb/community-extensions that update each extension to their latest commits — PR #1862 through PR #1866. These updates keep the extension ecosystem current with upstream development.
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 these past few months, systematically upgrading infrastructure across dozens of projects while contributing meaningful enhancements upstream to Apache Arrow and DuckDB core. February brought a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem launch across four languages with production-ready implementations, while January and December focused on future-proofing the Query-farm extension portfolio and hardening critical dependencies. Throughout it all, I've balanced open-source contributions with some fascinating classified work that I unfortunately can't discuss.
- Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility initiative across 40+ extensions, standardizing documentation and modernizing the entire Query-farm portfolio while shipping a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript with unified branding and documentation infrastructure.
- Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and public APIs for dictionary serialization—fixing silent data drops in production systems.
- Enhanced DuckDB core with profiler result hook callbacks, improved table scan explanations with schema/catalog details, and implemented safety hardening across the datasketches and crypto extensions through parameter validation and deserialization improvements.