Shell: Provide a summary of numbers if we are rendering only a single row

[Mytherin]

Many result sets contain only a single row (or single value), for example, when running SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl or similar summaries. In those cases, we often receive a single (often big) number. This PR adds support for a human readable rendering of these numbers, e.g.:

This option can be disabled using .large_number_rendering off:

D . large_number_rendering off
D select sum(l_extendedprice), sum(l_discount) from lineitem;
┌──────────────────────┬─────────────────┐
│ sum(l_extendedprice) │ sum(l_discount) │
│    decimal(38,2)     │  decimal(38,2)  │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────┤
│     2293813156773.36 │      2999373.24 │
└──────────────────────┴─────────────────┘

In addition, this can be applied to all numeric values using .large_number_rendering all

[Maxxen]

Love it!

[carlopi]

I love both of you, but ... I don't get it, I don't like (at all) the fact that this is not composable / special cased.

Apart from taste, I think one connected feedback is that it would be cool to have a way to persist this setting across sessions directly FROM the cli. Either a modifier on a given command, say .persist '.timer on', or like: .edit_rc that goes into editing ~/.duckdbrc (or whatever file we load by default).

Then it becomes simpler to add stuff, while making it easy for people to remember setting.

[Mytherin]

It's a contextual rendering that provides an easier way to see what a result means. The point of duckbox is to provide human-readable snapshots of result sets. That's also why we e.g. truncate rows/columns so that they fit the terminal window.

I guess we could optionally enable it for multiple rows (which is what I assume you mean with "it is not composable"?) - but that gets very busy very quickly since it doubles the rendering size of the result set. I think the single-row is a good compromise, since single-row queries are very common (especially for COUNT(*) which is the main purpose of this rendering).

[Mytherin]

Maybe a good compromise is to leave it out by default when stdout is not a terminal?

[carlopi]

Thanks for the deeper explanation! I sounded more certain than I am, and it's right that duckbox is not used by tools (that can do -md) / what not that is easier to parse, I guess trust your (and Max) judgment, we can always have it in first and experiment with it, we are not releasing tomorrow.

[Mytherin]

Thinking about this a bit more, maybe it would be nice to offer this at three levels:

• off - all numbers are printed using regular formatting
• footer - what this PR implements, for single row results large numbers are augmented with the readable format
• all - replace all large numbers with readable format