How original is Miller?

It isn’t. Miller is one of many, many participants in the online-analytical-processing culture. Other key participants include awk, SQL, spreadsheets, etc. etc. etc. Far from being an original concept, Miller explicitly strives to imitate several existing tools:

Unix toolkit: Intentional similarities as described in Miller features in the context of the Unix toolkit.

Recipes abound for command-line data analysis using the Unix toolkit. Here are just a couple of my favorites:

RecordStream: Miller owes particular inspiration to RecordStream. 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 sort, stats1 (analog of RecordStream’s collate), and delta operations, as well as filter and put, and pretty-print formatting.

stats_m: A third source of lineage is my Python stats_m module. This includes simple single-pass algorithms which form Miller’s stats1 and stats2 subcommands.

SQL: Fourthly, Miller’s group-by command name is from SQL, as is the term aggregate.

Added value: Miller’s added values include:

  • Name-indexing, compared to the Unix toolkit’s positional indexing.
  • Raw speed, compared to awk, RecordStream, stats_m, or various other kinds of Python/Ruby/etc. scripts one can easily create.
  • Compact keystroking for many common tasks, with a decent amount of flexibility.
  • Ability to handle text files on the Unix pipe, without need for creating database tables, compared to SQL databases.
  • Various file formats, and on-the-fly format conversion.

jq: Miller does for name-indexed text what jq does for JSON. If you’re not already familiar with jq, please check it out!.

What about similar tools? Here’s a comprehensive list: https://github.com/dbohdan/structured-text-tools. It doesn’t mention rows so here’s a plug for that as well. As it turns out, I learned about most of these after writing Miller.

What about DOTADIW? One of the key points of the Unix philosophy is that a tool should do one thing and do it well. Hence sort and cut do just one thing. Why does Miller put awk-like processing, a few SQL-like operations, and statistical reduction all into one tool (see also Reference)? This is a fair question. First note that many standard tools, such as awk and perl, do quite a few things — as does jq. But I could have pushed for putting format awareness and name-indexing options into cut, awk, and so on (so you could do cut -f hostname,uptime or awk '{sum += $x*$y}END{print sum}'). Patching cut, sort, 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 for its various features.

Why not use Perl/Python/Ruby etc.? Maybe you should. With those tools you’ll get far more expressive power, and sufficiently quick turnaround time for small-to-medium-sized data. Using Miller you’ll get something less than a complete programming language, but which is fast, with moderate amounts of flexibility and much less keystroking.

When I was first developing Miller I made a survey of several languages. Using low-level implementation languages like C, Go, Rust, and Nim, I’d need to create my own domain-specific language (DSL) which would always be less featured than a full programming language, but I’d get better performance. Using high-level interpreted languages such as Perl/Python/Ruby I’d get the language’s eval for free and I wouldn’t need a DSL; Miller would have mainly been a set of format-specific I/O hooks. If I’d gotten good enough performance from the latter I’d have done it without question and Miller would be far more flexible. But C won the performance criteria by a landslide so we have Miller in C with a custom DSL.

No, really, why one more command-line data-manipulation tool? I wrote Miller because I was frustrated with tools like grep, sed, and so on being line-aware without being format-aware. 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 RecordStream combined with the raw speed of the Unix toolkit. Miller does precisely that.