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datafold
data-diff
Python2022–2025
datafold / data-diff · Archived

data-diff

Compare tables within or across databases

8Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Compare tables within or across databases

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-06-22 15:28:04 UTC to 2025-02-19 00:43:27 UTC.

02462022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 4 submissions, 2 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC642
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
hichkaker·Dec 15, 2022Submission

Data-diff v0.3: DuckDB, efficient in-database diffing and more

Hi HN: We at Datafold are excited to announce a new release of data-diff (https://github.com/datafold/data-diff), an open-source tool that efficiently compares tables within or across a wide range of SQL databases. This release includes a lot of new features, improvements and bugfixes. We released the first version 6 months ago because we believe that diffing data is as fundamental of a capability as diffing code in data engineering workflows. Over the past few months, we have seen data-diff being adopted for a variety of use-cases, such as validating migration and replication of data between databases (diffing source and target) and tracking the effects of code changes on data (diffing staging/dev and production environments). With this new release data-diff is significantly faster at comparing tables within the same database, especially
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when there are a lot of differences between the tables. We've also added the ability to materialize the diff results into a database table, in addition to (or instead of) outputting them to stdout. We've added support for DuckDB, and for diffing schemas. Improved support for alphanumerics, and threading, and generally improved the API, the command-line interface, and stability of the tool. We believe that data-diff is a valuable addition to the open source community, and we are committed to continue growing it and the community around it. We encourage you to try it out and let us know what you think! You can read more about data-diff on our GitHub page at the following link: https://github.com/datafold/data-diff/ To see the list of changes for the 0.3.0 release, go here: https://github.com/datafold/data-diff/releases/tag/v0.3.0
26 points · Open discussion
There is plans to support pretty much every database. The reason it’s not supported currently is because its md5 hashing is too slow, so we need to do something different for it, e.g. just sum for types that support it. It’s similar for databases we plan to support that don’t support MD5 too, for example ElasticSearch. If anyone knows a dev on the MSSQL team we could speak to, we’d be eager to be connected See https://github.com/datafold/data-diff/issues/51
In Show HN: Data Diff – compare tables of any size across databases
hichkaker·Jun 22, 2022Submission

Show HN: Data Diff – compare tables of any size across databases

Gleb, Alex, Erez and Simon here – we are building an open-source tool for comparing data within and across databases at any scale. The repo is at https://github.com/datafold/data-diff, and our home page is https://datafold.com/. As a company, Datafold builds tools for data engineers to automate the most tedious and error-prone tasks falling through the cracks of the modern data stack, such as data testing and lineage. We launched two years ago with a tool for regression-testing changes to ETL code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24071955. It compares the produced data before and after the code change and shows the impact on values, aggregate metrics, and downstream data applications. While working with many customers on improving their data engineering experience, we kept hearing that they needed to diff their data across databases t
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o validate data replication between systems. There were 3 main use cases for such replication: (1) To perform analytics on transactional data in an OLAP engine (e.g. PostgreSQL > Snowflake) (2) To migrate between transactional stores (e.g. MySQL > PostgreSQL) (3) To leverage data in a specialized engine (e.g. PostgreSQL > ElasticSearch). Despite multiple vendors (e.g., Fivetran, Stitch) and open-source products (Airbyte, Debezium) solving data replication, there was no tooling for validating the correctness of such replication. When we researched how teams were going about this, we found that most have been either: Running manual checks: e.g., starting with COUNT(*) and then digging into the discrepancies, which often took hours to pinpoint the inconsistencies. Using distributed MPP engines such as Spark or Trino to download the complete datasets from both databases and then comparing them in memory – an expensive process requiring complex infrastructure. Our users wanted a tool that could: (1) Compare datasets quickly (seconds/minutes) at a large (millions/billions of rows) scale across different databases (2) Have minimal network IO and database workload overhead. (3) Provide straightforward output: basic stats and what rows are different. (4) Be embedded into a data orchestrator such as Airflow to run right after the replication process. So we built Data Diff as an open-source package available through pip. Data Diff can be run in a CLI or wrapped into any data orchestrator such as Airflow, Dagster, etc. To solve for speed at scale with minimal overhead, Data Diff relies on checksumming the data in both databases and uses binary search to identify diverging records. That way, it can compare arbitrarily large datasets in logarithmic time and IO – only transferring a tiny fraction of the data over the network. For example, it can diff tables with 25M rows in ~10s and 1B+ rows in ~5m across two physically separate PostgreSQL databases while running on a typical laptop. We've launched this tool under the MIT license so that any developer can use it, and to encourage contributions of other database connectors. We didn't want to charge engineers for such a fundamental use case. We make money by charging a license fee for advanced solutions such as column-level data lineage, CI workflow automation, and ML-powered alerts.
127 points · Open discussion

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