November 2025

Rusty dove deep into DuckDB core territory, opening two PRs (#19951 and #19954) to enhance table function capabilities around parallelism support and operator ordering. He also filed issue #19939 after stumbling upon a gnarly BatchedDataCollection::Merge error—because nothing says "productive Wednesday" like debugging batch index 9999999999999.

Rusty dove deep into DuckDB core, opening PR #19938 to add safety guards around aggregate function combine callbacks and PR #19929 to fix an optimizer bug with order-sensitive aggregates. He also proposed issue #19921 for a COPY TO interface targeting non-file destinations like Kafka—because why should files have all the fun? Meanwhile, blake3 got some debugging love with test fixes and WIP improvements.

Rusty dove deep into DuckDB core internals, opening issue #19892 about a gnarly SEGV with order-sensitive aggregate functions and their combine callback behavior, then promptly opened PR #19903 to fix a row_start type issue in PartitionStatistics. Meanwhile, airport got some housekeeping love with CI schedule tweaks and main branch syncing—because even extensions need their maintenance windows.

Rusty planted the first seeds in blake3, a new Query-farm repository that promises cryptographic hashing goodness. The double "initial commit" suggests either a git hiccup or a philosophical statement about the nature of beginnings—either way, something BLAKE3-flavored is brewing in the DuckDB extension ecosystem.

Rusty opened issue #24 on rs-merkle-tree, proposing the ability to attach data to nodes beyond just their index—because sometimes a tree needs more than just structural integrity, it needs personality. A quiet Saturday of contemplation and feature requests, proving that even light dev days can plant seeds for future growth.

Rusty spent the day deep in DuckDB table function mechanics, pushing two cardinality and upstream fixes to airport while opening a pair of thoughtful issues on the main duckdb repo. Issue #19818 explores the nuanced dance between filter_pushdown and pushdown_complex_filter, while issue #19801 questions whether PartitionStatistics.row_start is just decorative furniture—a classic "is this load-bearing code?" investigation.

Rusty rolled up his sleeves for some community housekeeping, bumping the inflector dependency in duckdb/community-extensions and opening PR #798 to seal the deal. A quick maintenance day keeping the DuckDB extension ecosystem humming along—sometimes the best work is the preventative kind.

Rusty spent the day deep in the shadows, working exclusively on Project 167classified project with four commits worth of classified contributions. Whatever's happening behind those closed doors, it's keeping him busy—though the rest of the dev world will have to wonder what secrets are being compiled.

Rusty embarked on a performance deep-dive, opening issue #19728 on duckdb about scalar function performance quirks between single-threaded and multi-threaded execution. He optimized a5-rs with PR #37, introducing thread-local caching for dodecahedron projections (because even geodesic grids deserve some TLC), then bumped the a5 extension across community-extensions with PR #792. Between the architectural improvements and community support on duckdb-excel issue #25, it was a day of both performance hunting and open-source stewardship.

Rusty went on a DuckDB extension spree, introducing two new community extensions to the ecosystem: JSONata for JSON transformation wizardry and Inflector for string manipulation magic. He opened PR #791 and PR #790 (plus PR #789 for good measure) on duckdb/community-extensions, then pivoted to field feature requests on a5, discussing compact and uncompact functions in issue #1. A productive day of expanding the DuckDB universe one extension at a time!

Rusty spent the day playing dependency whack-a-mole, bumping Rust crates in a5 and propagating the changes upstream to the DuckDB community extensions repo via PR #788. Not content with mere maintenance, he also opened issue #303 on duck-read-cache-fs advocating for proper Cache-Control header respect—because even caching layers deserve to follow the rules of polite HTTP society.

Rusty spent the day wrangling version bumps for the a5 extension, pushing fixes to get it up to 0.6.0 with updates to a5_compact and a5_uncompact. After polishing things up in the Query-farm repo, he submitted PR #787 to community-extensions to propagate the changes. Meanwhile, he also filed issue #64 on duckdb-power-query-connector suggesting the removal of required MotherDuck authentication tokens—because sometimes optional is better than mandatory.

Rusty channeled his inner UX designer and brand ambassador, opening issue #290 on duckdb-odbc to give the Windows installer some much-needed logo love. He also discovered the stochastic extension playing hide-and-seek with its functions in duckdb-wasm (issue #2122), proving that even probability distributions need a good debugging session now and then.