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 →A productive day across multiple DuckDB-related projects, with focus on compatibility improvements and upstream synchronization.
## 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 ↔ Arrow Compatibility: A Status Page
A working status page for the Arrow-related issues and PRs I've filed against duckdb/duckdb — the UNION saga, schema/data disagreements in nested appenders, type fidelity through round-trips, and the bigger question of how defensive the C Data Interface should be.
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
What I've Been Working On
Full activity log →I've been focused on ecosystem stewardship across the DuckDB and Apache Arrow communities, systematically upgrading dependencies, shipping production-ready infrastructure, and contributing upstream enhancements that fix silent data issues. February highlighted my work future-proofing the Query-farm extension portfolio for DuckDB 1.5 compatibility while simultaneously rolling out a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with unified branding and multi-language implementations. The quarter overall reflects a balance between core database improvements, cross-language contributions to foundational projects, and some classified operations that kept things mysteriously productive.
• Led a DuckDB 1.5 compatibility initiative across 27 repositories, opening 40+ PRs to standardize and future-proof extensions like airport, shellfs, and webmacro while unifying documentation structures.
• Shipped a complete vgi-rpc ecosystem with production-ready implementations in Python, C++, Go, and TypeScript, including unified branding, documentation infrastructure, and Apache 2.0 licensing across all projects.
• Contributed upstream enhancements to Apache Arrow across four language implementations, adding custom metadata support for RecordBatch IPC messages and fixing silent data drops affecting production systems.