mirror of
https://github.com/johnkerl/miller.git
synced 2026-07-18 00:45:47 +00:00
164 lines
7.8 KiB
HTML
164 lines
7.8 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
|
|
<html lang="en">
|
|
|
|
<!-- PAGE GENERATED FROM template.html and content-for-originality.html BY poki. -->
|
|
<!-- PLEASE MAKE CHANGES THERE AND THEN RE-RUN poki. -->
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>
|
|
<meta name="description" content="Miller documentation"/>
|
|
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/> <!-- mobile-friendly -->
|
|
<title> How original is Miller? </title>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/miller.css"/>
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/poki-callbacks.css"/>
|
|
</head>
|
|
|
|
<!-- ================================================================ -->
|
|
<script type="text/javascript">
|
|
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
|
|
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
|
|
</script>
|
|
<script type="text/javascript">
|
|
try {
|
|
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-15651652-1");
|
|
pageTracker._trackPageview();
|
|
} catch(err) {}
|
|
</script>
|
|
|
|
<script type="text/javascript">
|
|
function toggle(divName) {
|
|
var eleDiv = document.getElementById(divName);
|
|
if (eleDiv != null) {
|
|
if (eleDiv.style.display == "block") {
|
|
eleDiv.style.display = "none";
|
|
} else {
|
|
eleDiv.style.display = "block";
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
</script>
|
|
|
|
<!--
|
|
The background image is from a screenshot of a Google search for "data analysis
|
|
tools", lightened and sepia-toned. Over this was placed a Mac Terminal app with
|
|
very light-grey font and translucent background, in which a few statistical
|
|
Miller commands were run with pretty-print-tabular output format.
|
|
-->
|
|
<body background="pix/sepia-overlay.jpg">
|
|
|
|
<!-- ================================================================ -->
|
|
<table width="100%">
|
|
<tr>
|
|
|
|
<!-- navbar -->
|
|
<td width="15%">
|
|
<!--
|
|
<img src="pix/mlr.jpg" />
|
|
<img style="border-width:1px; color:black;" src="pix/mlr.jpg" />
|
|
-->
|
|
|
|
<div class="pokinav">
|
|
<center><titleinbody>Miller</titleinbody></center>
|
|
|
|
<!-- PAGE LIST GENERATED FROM template.html BY poki -->
|
|
<br/>User info:
|
|
<br/>• <a href="index.html">About</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="file-formats.html">File formats</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="feature-comparison.html">Miller features in the context of the Unix toolkit</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="record-heterogeneity.html">Record-heterogeneity</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="performance.html">Performance</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="etymology.html">Why call it Miller?</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="originality.html"><b>How original is Miller?</b></a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="reference.html">Reference</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="data-examples.html">Data examples</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="to-do.html">Things to do</a>
|
|
<br/>Developer info:
|
|
<br/>• <a href="build.html">Compiling, portability, dependencies, and testing</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="whyc.html">Why C?</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="contact.html">Contact information</a>
|
|
<br/>• <a href="https://github.com/johnkerl/miller">GitHub repo</a>
|
|
<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>
|
|
<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>
|
|
<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</td>
|
|
|
|
<!-- page body -->
|
|
<td>
|
|
<center> <titleinbody> How original is Miller? </titleinbody> </center>
|
|
<p>
|
|
|
|
<!-- BODY COPIED FROM content-for-originality.html BY poki -->
|
|
<p/> It isn’t. Miller is one of many, many participants in the
|
|
online-analytical-processing culture. Other key participants include
|
|
<tt>awk</tt>, SQL, spreadsheets, etc. etc. etc. Far from being an original
|
|
concept, Miller explicitly strives to imitate several existing tools:
|
|
|
|
<p/>
|
|
<boldmaroon>Unix toolkit</boldmaroon>: Intentional similarities as described in
|
|
<a href="feature-comparison.html">Miller features in the context of the Unix toolkit</a>.
|
|
|
|
<p/>Recipes abound for command-line data analysis using the Unix toolkit. Here are just a couple of my favorites:
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li/> <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Data_Analysis_From_The_Unix_Command_Line">http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ad_Hoc_Data_Analysis_From_The_Unix_Command_Line</a>
|
|
<li/> <a href="http://www.gregreda.com/2013/07/15/unix-commands-for-data-science">http://www.gregreda.com/2013/07/15/unix-commands-for-data-science</a>
|
|
</ul>
|
|
|
|
<p/> <boldmaroon>RecordStream</boldmaroon>: Miller owes particular inspiration
|
|
to <a href="https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream">RecordStream</a>. The
|
|
key difference is that RecordStream is a Perl-based tool for manipulating JSON
|
|
(including requiring it to separately manipulate other formats such as CSV into
|
|
and out of JSON), while Miller is fast C which handles its formats natively.
|
|
The similarities include the <tt>sort</tt>, <tt>stats1</tt> (analog of
|
|
RecordStream’s <tt>collate</tt>), and <tt>delta</tt> operations, as well
|
|
as <tt>filter</tt> and <tt>put</tt>, and pretty-print formatting.
|
|
|
|
<p/> <boldmaroon>stats_m</boldmaroon>: A third source of lineage is my Python
|
|
<a href="https://github.com/johnkerl/scripts-math/tree/master/stats">stats_m</a>
|
|
module. This includes simple single-pass algorithms which form Miller’s
|
|
<tt>stats1</tt> and <tt>stats2</tt> subcommands.
|
|
|
|
<p/> <boldmaroon>SQL</boldmaroon>: Fourthly, Miller’s <tt>group-by</tt> command
|
|
name is from SQL, as is the term <tt>aggregate</tt>.
|
|
|
|
<p/> <boldmaroon>Added value</boldmaroon>:
|
|
Miller’s added values include:
|
|
<ul>
|
|
<li> Name-indexing, compared to the Unix toolkit’s positional indexing.
|
|
<li> Raw speed, compared to <tt>awk</tt>, RecordStream, <tt>stats_m</tt>, or various other kinds of Python/Ruby/etc. scripts one can easily create.
|
|
<li> Ability to handle text files on the Unix pipe, without need for creating database tables, compared to SQL databases.
|
|
</ul>
|
|
|
|
<p/><boldmaroon>jq</boldmaroon>: Miller does for name-indexed text what
|
|
<a href="http://stedolan.github.io/jq/">jq</a> does for JSON. If you’re
|
|
not already familiar with <tt>jq</tt>, please <a href="http://stedolan.github.io/jq/">check it out!</a>.
|
|
|
|
<p/><boldmaroon>What about DOTADIW?</boldmaroon> One of the key points of the
|
|
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy">Unix philosophy</a> is
|
|
that a tool should do one thing and do it well. Hence <tt>sort</tt> and
|
|
<tt>cut</tt> do just one thing. Why does Miller put <tt>awk</tt>-like
|
|
processing, a few SQL-like operations, and statistical reduction all into one
|
|
tool (see also <a href="reference.html">Reference</a>)? This is a fair
|
|
question. First note that many standard tools, such as <tt>awk</tt> and
|
|
<tt>perl</tt>, do quite a few things — as does <tt>jq</tt>. But I could
|
|
have pushed for putting format awareness and name-indexing options into
|
|
<tt>cut</tt>, <tt>awk</tt>, and so on (so you could do <tt>cut -f
|
|
hostname,uptime</tt> or <tt>awk '{sum += $x*$y}END{print sum}'</tt>). Patching
|
|
<tt>cut</tt>, <tt>sort</tt>, etc. on multiple operating systems is a
|
|
non-starter in terms of uptake. Moreover, it makes sense for me to have Miller
|
|
be a tool which collects together format-aware record-stream processing into
|
|
one place, with good reuse of Miller-internal library code.
|
|
|
|
<p/> <boldmaroon>No, really, why one more command-line data-manipulation
|
|
tool?</boldmaroon> I wrote Miller because I was frustrated with tools like
|
|
<tt>grep</tt>, <tt>sed</tt>, and so on being <i>line-aware</i> without being
|
|
<i>format-aware</i>. The single most poignant example I can think of is seeing
|
|
people grep data lines out of their CSV files and sadly losing their header
|
|
lines. While some lighter-than-SQL processing is very nice to have, at core I
|
|
wanted the format-awareness of <a
|
|
href="https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream">RecordStream</a> combined
|
|
with the raw speed of the Unix toolkit. Miller does precisely that.
|
|
</td>
|
|
|
|
</table>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html>
|