Extending SQLite with Rust to support Excel files as virtual tables

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This article explains how SQLite can be extended with Rust. In particular, it will outline SQLite’s mechanism called virtual tables and showcase how we can use it from Rust programming language. By Sergey Khabibullin.

We will be dealing with some amount of unsafe Rust code. There are frameworks that can be used to abstract away some unsafe code, but we’ll not use them because rust-bindgen will take care of generating the bindings for us, and we will only use unsafe in the relatively thin layer of code that connects SQLite and Rust.

The article main points are:

  • Objectives
  • Project structure
  • Entry point and modules
  • Virtual table
  • Cursor

Needless to say, this article is not a complete guide on extending SQLite. I tried to cover parts that appeared essential and interesting. It’s always a trade-off when you write technical articles: you want to cover more and in more detail but you have to set some boundaries otherwise the article will be infinite in size and complexity. Good read!

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Tags performance app-development programming functional-programming