Explore and Query

Browse

Open the converted taxi data in the interactive TUI:

vx browse yellow_tripdata_2024-01.vortex

The browser has three tabs (cycle with Tab):

Layout — Browse the hierarchical layout structure of the file. Use hjkl or arrow keys to navigate, / to fuzzy-search for a specific layout node.

Segments — Visual grid showing how segments are laid out in the file, with byte offsets and row ranges.

Query — A full SQL console powered by DataFusion. Write queries against a table called data:

SELECT
    PULocationID,
    COUNT(*) as num_trips,
    ROUND(AVG(trip_distance), 2) as avg_distance,
    ROUND(AVG(total_amount), 2) as avg_total
FROM data
GROUP BY PULocationID
ORDER BY num_trips DESC
LIMIT 10

Use [ and ] to paginate results, s to sort by the selected column.

Inspect

View the file structure without the full TUI:

# Show the encoding tree
vx tree layout yellow_tripdata_2024-01.vortex

# Show detailed segment layout
vx segments yellow_tripdata_2024-01.vortex

# Inspect file metadata (EOF marker, postscript, footer)
vx inspect yellow_tripdata_2024-01.vortex

All inspection commands support --json for machine-readable output.

Standalone SQL

For non-interactive use, the vx query command runs a SQL query and outputs JSON:

vx query yellow_tripdata_2024-01.vortex \
    --sql "SELECT COUNT(*) as num_trips, ROUND(SUM(total_amount), 2) as total_revenue FROM data"

This is useful for scripting and piping results to other tools.