Feature Request: *_scan() helper

[bill-ash]

In more or less any package code that we write for our pipelines that use duckdb, we end up implementing some version of:

def T(path): 
    _PATH= ... resolve absolute path or URL prefix
    return f"delta_scan('{_PATH / path}')

to be used in notebooks like:

duckdb.sql(f"""
    select * from {T('delta/table/path')}
""")

There is probably good reason to not add some utility function like this but sharing in case I'm wrong. 😊

[evertlammerts]

Hey @bill-ash, I'm not sure I get it... Do you mean we could expose table-valued functions as python functions so you could do duckdb.*_scan(path)? We already do this for a bunch of functions, e.g. from_df, from_arrow, from_query, from_parquet, from_csv_auto. For those that we do not you can use duckdb.table_function or con.table_function. E.g. duckdb.table_function('delta_scan', path). Does that help?

Note that delta_scan specifically is an extension function, that's not something we'd put in the core duckdb module.