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 opened two complementary PRs addressing a fundamental limitation in DuckDB: the inability to interleave streaming SELECT queries with DML operations (UPDATE, INSERT, DELETE) within the same transaction.
Rusty spent the day coordinating a synchronized v0.6.0 release across the vgi-rpc ecosystem while addressing critical bugs upstream in DuckDB.
A productive day spanning multiple VGI RPC implementations and upstream contributions. Work centered on standardizing cross-language behavior, adding observability instrumentation, and enhancing external storage support.
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
Query.Farm: Growing DuckDB Community Extensions
DuckDB Amsterdam Meetup #3 — Amsterdam, Netherlands
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've spent the last three months deepening my work across the DuckDB ecosystem and open-source infrastructure, with a focus on scaling extension compatibility, shipping production-grade systems, and contributing upstream to foundational projects like Apache Arrow. February highlighted ecosystem stewardship—future-proofing two dozen extensions for DuckDB 1.5 while launching a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem across four languages with unified branding and documentation. Between classified operations and public work, I've balanced high-impact infrastructure upgrades with targeted contributions to performance and data safety.
• Led DuckDB 1.5 compatibility efforts across the Query-farm extension portfolio, opening 40+ PRs to standardize and future-proof extensions like airport, shellfs, webmacro, and inflector while harmonizing documentation structures across 29 repositories.
• Shipped a production-ready vgi-rpc ecosystem with implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, complete with unified branding, Cloudflare-hosted documentation, and Apache 2.0 licensing across the board.
• Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and public APIs for dictionary serialization to prevent silent data drops in production systems.