As with most other database management systems (DBMSs), DuckDB provides us with a way of finding the position of an element in a list. This is the index at which the specified element occurs in the list.
Actually, DuckDB provides us with four synonymous functions for doing this (i.e. they all do the same thing).
DuckDB offers two primary functions for type conversion: cast() and try_cast(). While they serve similar purposes, their behavior when handling invalid conversions differs significantly, which can greatly impact our data processing workflows.
DuckDB has a json_keys() function that we can use to extract the keys from a JSON object. It returns the keys as a list of strings (LIST of VARCHAR).
You may be aware that DuckDB includes a typeof() function that works just like the SQLite equivalent; it returns the data type of its argument. But did you know that DuckDB also provides us with a pg_typeof() function that does essentially the same thing?
So why would DuckDB need a pg_typeof() function that does basically the same thing as typeof()? Let’s find out!
DuckDB has a list_where() function that returns a list after a user-supplied mask has been applied. We pass the list as the first argument, and a list of Boolean values as the second. The list of Boolean values is applied as a mask to the list, which determines which values in the list are returned.
DuckDB’s LIMIT and SAMPLE clauses both allow users to work with subsets of data, but they serve fundamentally different purposes and operate on different principles. While LIMIT returns a fixed number of rows from the beginning of a result set, SAMPLE provides a random sample from the dataset.
DuckDB provides us with a good selection of functions for working with date and timestamp values. One such function is the LAST_DAY() function, which returns the last day of the month of the given date.
The way it works is, we pass a date to the function, and it returns the date of the last day of that month.
DuckDB provides us with a list_resize() function for those occasions where we need to resize a list. It also offers an alias called array_resize() that does exactly the same thing. When we resize a list using these functions, we specify how big we want the resulting list to be, and we can also specify a value to use for any extra elements that are added to the list.
DuckDB has a repeat() function that enables us to output a repeating value easily and concisely. The way it works is that we pass the value to the function, followed by how many times we want it to be repeated. It returns that value repeated the specified number of times.
In DuckDB, we can use the ISINF() function to check whether a value is finite. DuckDB supports infinite values, and so this function allows us to check for that. This can be useful when working with floating-point data that might contain special values like NaN (Not a Number) or infinity. The function also works on date and timestamp values, as they can be infinite too.