Joining Data

• Summary
• About Cookbooks
• Example Usage
• Contact us!

Summary

Similar to the well-known SQL construct, the Zed language provides a join operator that can be used to combine data sources. This cookbook describes how it can be used with the Brim application.

About Cookbooks

Brim cookbooks provide an opportunity to "test drive" new/experimental features in the Brim application and related Zed tools. They also walk through details of how Brim and Zed tools function and therefore may inspire other creative configurations.

All efforts are made to disclose known caveats and limitations that are relevant to the configurations shown. However, due to the potential to encounter bugs in evolving functionality, it is recommended that you initially follow cookbooks in a non-production, lab-style setting. As such features become more complete and stable, cookbooks may be retired and replaced with regular User Documentation.

Please report any bugs or usability issues you find when working with cookbooks by opening an issue or reaching out on the Brim public Slack. We'd also love to hear your success stories and variations, so please don't be shy!

Example Usage

The same operations shown in the Zed language join tutorial can be performed in the Brim app. However, the more sophisticated logic of a join operation is often best expressed in a multi-line Zed script A multi-line editor is planned for a future Brim release (see brim/2264 for details). In the meantime, multi-line Zed scripts can be pasted and run in the current single-line search bar. You may find it helpful to edit your multi-line Zed scripts in an external editor and paste them into Brim to run them.

By default, the source data used for Zed a query in Brim will be whichever pool you've currently selected in the Pools list in the left panel. Therefore, the example shown in the Self Joins section of the tutorial can be run as shown if both the example data sources have been imported into the same pool (e.g., cat fruit.ndjson people.ndjson > all.ndjson at the shell before dragging all.ndjson into Brim).

If the data sources are in separate pools (such as if we'd dragged fruit.ndjson and people.ndjson into Brim separately), specify each pool source in from. Below is the Inner Join example from the tutorial run in Brim this way.

Contact us!

If you have questions or feedback about this cookbook, we'd like to hear from you! Please join our public Slack or open an issue. Thanks!