Looker Founder Helps Create New Data Exploration Language, Malloy
Lloyd Tabb is keeping busy since Looker was sold to Google back in 2019. The latest open source project for the prolific computer scientist and his Google team is Malloy, a new language that’s based on SQL but which Tabb says is more approachable and simpler to use.
Malloy is described on its GitHub page as “an experimental language for describing data relationships and transformations. It is both a semantic modeling language and a querying language that runs queries against a relational database.”
One of the key features of Malloy, which was introduced in mid-2021, is its ability to work with nested data sets, particularly those supported by BigQuery. The language also generates SQL compatible with Postgres.
The development team behind Malloy says that by combining the modeling and query language, Malloy simplifies much of the data work that is currently done in SQL, making computations modular, composable, reusable, and extendable “in ways that are consistent with modern programming paradigms.”
“SQL is complete but ugly,” the Malloy backers write on the GitHub readme file. “Everything is expressible, but nothing is reusable; simple ideas are complex to express; the language is verbose and lacks smart defaults. Malloy is immediately understandable by SQL users, and far easier to use and learn.”
