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DuckDB

DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. You can use the Hugging Face paths (`hf://`) to access data on the Hub:

The DuckDB CLI (Command Line Interface) is a single, dependency-free executable. There are also other APIs available for running DuckDB, including Python, C++, Go, Java, Rust, and more. For additional details, visit their clients page.

For installation details, visit the installation page.

Starting from version `v0.10.3`, the DuckDB CLI includes native support for accessing datasets on the Hugging Face Hub via URLs with the `hf://` scheme. Here are some features you can leverage with this powerful tool:

- Query public datasets and your own gated and private datasets
- Analyze datasets and perform SQL operations
- Combine datasets and export it to different formats
- Conduct vector similarity search on embedding datasets
- Implement full-text search on datasets

For a complete list of DuckDB features, visit the DuckDB documentation.

To start the CLI, execute the following command in the installation folder:

    ./duckdb

##
Forging the Hugging Face URL

To access Hugging Face datasets, use the following URL format:

    hf://datasets/{my-username}/{my-dataset}/{path_to_file}

- my-username, the user or organization of the dataset, e.g. `ibm`
- my-dataset, the dataset name, e.g: `duorc`
- path_to_parquet_file, the parquet file path which supports glob patterns, e.g `**/*.parquet`, to query all parquet files

You can query auto-converted Parquet files using the @~parquet branch, which corresponds to the `refs/convert/parquet` revision. For more details, refer to the documentation at https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets-server/en/parquet#conversion-to-parquet.

To reference the `refs/convert/parquet` revision of a dataset, use the following syntax:

    hf://datasets/{my-username}/{my-dataset}@~parquet/{path_to_file}

Here is a sample URL following the above syntax:

    hf://datasets/ibm/duorc@~parquet/ParaphraseRC/test/0000.parquet

Let’s start with a quick demo to query all the rows of a dataset:

    FROM 'hf://datasets/ibm/duorc/ParaphraseRC/*.parquet' LIMIT 3;

Or using traditional SQL syntax:

    SELECT * FROM 'hf://datasets/ibm/duorc/ParaphraseRC/*.parquet' LIMIT 3;

In the following sections, we will cover more complex operations you can perform with DuckDB on Hugging Face datasets.

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