I have a database on my local machine with 200 million records in one table and 2 other related tables. Even the most complex queries take about 1 minute to vibe code and paste into the DuckDB browser playground UI and always less than 5 seconds to return the result. For a humble product manager it feels like a superpower.
If you're reading this and curious: consider writing a duckdb community extension* or contributing to an existing one*<p>duckdb is becoming a kind of data superglue between a lot of data ecosystems (GIS, observability, analytics, lakehouses, object storage, etc) that don't talk to each other typically, and it's worth checking out in 2026.<p>* <a href="https://github.com/duckdb/extension-template" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/duckdb/extension-template</a>
* <a href="https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/" rel="nofollow">https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/</a>
I just started doing this last week!<p>I'm not very good at C++, but coupled with the extension template and codex I got a basic version of my extension working within an hour. Go for it!
Just curious whether one can earn money making these exts?
[flagged]
I use duckdb HEAVILY at work and it's been a game changer. I'm sifting through terabytes of data multiple times a day, mixing, matching, updating, filtering, DuckDB is second to none. For anyone that hasn't used it: you are missing out.
This may be useful for somebody: We are also using DuckDB heavily at my workplace (we do Tax analytics of very large companies with huge amounts of data). We have certain DuckDB processes that happened in AWS infrastructure, where the data is saved in GP3 disks.<p>We didn't know that for GP3 disks, you can increase not only IOPS but also Read/Write Throughput [1] which by default is 125 MB/s. So by default we were not seeing the performance we expected.<p>Once we increased the throughput of the EBS, it was amazing. So if you are not seeing the performance you read about online when using DuckDB, it may be something like that.<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-plan-storage-gp3-migration-selection.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-p...</a>
DuckDB is amazing for any sort of fast data analysis when the data is small enough that it can fit on your laptop<p>Recently at work I've been using it to analyse the Claude code sessions of every engineer at our company (that we upload to S3) and it's been extremely helpful to help us find gaps in devex and have clear metrics to back up the impact of fixing them<p>Another thing it's been really useful for has been getting metrics on Claude skills usage and then dive into use-cases by looking at the transcripts<p>Other engineers that had never touched DuckDB were so impressed with how easy it is for AI agents to write queries on our dataset
>> DuckDB is amazing for any sort of fast data analysis when the data is small enough that it can fit on your laptop<p>I agree, and the dirty (not so) secret big data providers like Snowflake try to hide: the majority of your work is not big data and WILL fit on your local machine. My last company was spending $2M/yr on contract with Snowflake, and another million between Fivetran and Matillion. Of the 1200 clients using analytics maybe 2 had enough data to warrant "infinite scalability" and a dozen wanted Snowflake because they already had corporate warehouses in Snowflake (they probably didn't need it either). Turns out the Extract and Load could be handled by bog-standard C# code and a bunch of SQL, while almost everyone was better off with a DuckDB database running locally, often in the browser. You've probably heard YAGNI before (You Ain't Gonna Need It) but it's even more likely with "Big Data". #SmallDataConvert
Folks have been beating this drum for as long as I've worked in software, dating to the Hadoop era, and it remains true today. So much of "big data" only appears big because it's poorly stored, or is represented wastefully (in persistent storage or in memory).
Like sqlite, duckdb is underappreciated as a production database. You can totally run it on servers or even "serverless" and do some heavy data transformations or with the right server size work with large scale datasets (up to a TB compressed seems fine).
This. I've recently used both duckdb and sqlite to power a dashboard for a small restaurant of a family member. It converts all their sales to a very tiny parquet files, daily.<p>The file fits in memory and can do all sort of computation in the browser itself. The backend is extremely simple, it just loads the JS and serves the parquet files.<p>It was also trivial to let the owner do their own queries, just give the schema to an LLM and let it use the charting library, no data hallucinations. If they need it in the dashboard they can either use that one or ask me to review that query.<p>To be honest, given how simple some things became, it's been really fun to work on.
Similar experience here. The best thing I've built in a long time is replacing a complex (and scary) permissions system built on top of Snowflake with single role duckdb databases that - aside from no longer worrying about bugs leaking data across roles - are more performant, timely and flexible. Combined with the use of AI this is the way forward IMO.<p>At the other end of the spectrum, working with random data on "what if?" and exploration tasks with DuckDB is fun again. it's so straightforward and fast, with tools and functions for pretty much everything.
> no data hallucinations<p>Dangerous thing to assert. It’ll happily run SQL that works, but doesn’t necessarily correspond to intentions or unstated assumptions about the data.
I have a a theory that LLMs are going to be the death knell of big SaaS. It's so much harder to build and maintain an massive SaaS that does 80% of what 80% of your customers want, than it is to build something small and simple that does 100% of what one customer wants.
neat
Not to mention it can query across heterogeneous sources, so the same query can use a duckdb table, sqlite, csv, and parquet (including predicate pushdown).
Agree, in addition to that DuckDB also works quite well for data that is too big to fit in memory or on the machine DuckDB is on (predicate push down, out of core processing, …).
>Recently at work I've been using it to analyse the Claude code sessions of every engineer at our company (that we upload to S3) and it's been extremely helpful to help us find gaps in devex and have clear metrics to back up the impact of fixing them<p>Nice! How do you set things up so that your engineers's claude code sessions upload to S3? Thanks for the help in advance
Probably on a business / Enterprise plan, which has managed settings and also telemetry export. Give it a collector endpoint to export to and then have collector send to s3.
If you use OpenCode, the sessions are all in a local sqlite database. After lunch I'm pushing one of my agents to crunch some data from that using duckdb...
Can you please expand more on the claude analysis part. What exactly you analysed and what outcome it helped with ?
Not who you responded to, but I've been working on cctx. It's an open source tool for analyzing claude code sessions to see where things went wrong(tool failure loops, bloated context, and the like).<p><a href="https://github.com/jacquardlabs/cctx" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jacquardlabs/cctx</a>
[flagged]
DuckDb makes so much of my life easier, though I've never used it for large problems. The ability to run `select * from 'data.json'` is just lovely. The fact that it's also a powerhouse is so impressive, I'd usually expect a project to be good at small problems (like mine) xor large problems, but not both
Yup. And an extra benefit that you can treat any file like a table, so you can also do something like<p><pre><code> UPDATE my_table
SET x = file1.x,
y = file2.y
FROM 'first_file.csv' file1
LEFT JOIN 's3://my_bucket/second_file.parquet' file2
ON file1.id = file2.id
WHERE mytable.id = file1.id;</code></pre>
DuckDB is a major RDBMS, yet there's almost no support for it from DB migration frameworks, etc.
> DuckDB has received widespread adoption because it's just so damn easy to use.<p>This was a major factor in my initial adoption. Since then it has stuck because it’s also absurdly capable, versatile, and fast.<p>If it wasn’t so easy to use I suspect I wouldn’t have adopted it when I did. The ergonomics are crazy. It still impresses me regularly.
I’ve enjoyed reading that article a lot. I have used DuckDB as a tool in a code assistant and I am very happy with what I see so far.
It's an interesting project, but the discussion on HN looks weird. It gets brought up every few weeks[1] and everyone just spams comments with messages about how "fast" it is.<p>DuckDB is fast <i>for some specific workloads</i>. If you use it for most other things, it is at least an order of magnitude slower than SQLite. It also has some limitations in terms of what SQL it will currently run (e.g. I immediately ran into an issue with recursive queries). That will probably get better with time.<p>[1] If you search HN for "sqlite" and "duckdb" you get 4,310 hits and 2,398 hits respectively. That's a very heavy skew, considering SQLite is everywhere and had been around for a quarter century, while DuckDB effectively appeared on the scene two years ago.
I'm going to sound like a broken record but... different use cases. They're analogous in the comparison "sqlite for analytics" but completely different architectures and implementations. Part of this is the fault of the developers, but I feel they were trying to highlight the similar focus on in-process, zero dependencies, simplicity and test coverage - not a direct "vs" comparison. IME recursive queries in analytical workflows are not very common; they typically work against the fundamental data layout on disk.<p>SQLite is awesome and I would love to see more posts about it, but the reality is one of the major reasons it's awesome is the no-drama/stability/it just works. DuckDB is seeing a lot of development on many fronts so there's a lot more to learn and talk about right now.
> while DuckDB effectively appeared on the scene two years ago.<p>duckdb is ~7 years old by now. it was quite popular long before it became 1.0. heck, even motherduck has been founded 4 years ago.
> DuckDB is fast for some specific workloads<p>Yes, it's specifically promoted as DBMS for OLAP workload. And it's usually compared to ClickHouse, another analytical DBMS. So people who use it know why it's good.
The one huge caveat for anyone that cannot use dynamic linking e.g. in an AppStore context, DuckDB isn’t a great choice. It’s very hard to statically link extensions.<p>This is where Arrow wins I think. Arrow CPP for example has very portable builds and the C interface is very usable for building bindings.<p>DuckDB is excellent, but it’s more a black box than a library.<p>Edit: after a conversation with a robot, it would seem that the DuckDB and ArrowCPP C APIs are complimentary, so it's very possible to have Arrow CPP and DuckDB to coexist in an app, each with its own strength. Arrow CPP doen't have a simple SQL story for example.
ai; dr
The data scientists I work with use this. Why do they use it? I don't really know much about it, but I've noticed they use it quite often. I mainly use MySQL or PostgreSQL. What are the advantages of DuckDB? It seems like they usually use it as an alternative to Pandas.
DuckDB has been probably my most used tool in 2026 - if you're comfortable with SQL it's incredible at quickly prototyping and slicing / dicing data.<p>I do a lot of experiments with regexes, and if you get used to the RE2 syntax that DuckDB uses, you can see up to 10-100x uplift in terms of speed compared to Postgres on things like regexp_matches(), regexp_extract(), etc (depending on query/table/machine specifics). It has quite powerful scripting with custom Macros, fixes a lot of annoyances of SQL for me compared to Postgres.<p>I think if you have access to a machine with a lot of RAM / cores and a beefy data set, then it's basically like a RAMdisk version of Snowflake running locally on your machine.<p>(and of course the fact that it makes it convenient to read CSV/parquet, read/write from S3, etc) - it's a very ergonomic tool.
Here is the thing, it’s a write only single file format. If you need to run analytical queries it’s optimized for reading, you just open a file and query for the parts you want. If you have multiple clients that read and write data to the database, you should use postgresql.<p>It’s not really a database in the traditional sense, there is no ACID complexity, it’s a library that lets use write SQL to query a tabular data file.
Primarily the ability to work directly with data in its native format (CSV for example) without needing ETL.
How does this work in a production setup? Can this be set up like a server, or is it mostly for individual users to play around with data?
The idea is that you treat data storage and data processing as two distinct tasks. You have your data in S3 or HDFS or a local directory and you run DuckDB on whatever single-node compute you have: a local machine or a container in a cluster.<p>There are companies that write cluster computing engines with duckdb as the byte-cruncher at their heart, but usually it's more like NumPy, Pandas or Polars on steroids. Or SQLite, but for running OLAP queries.
In my previous job (working with electric vehicles) we had a AWS batch job that pulled all data from S3[1] into containers (one container per vehicle) and then push that data into duckdb then run some basic queries and data analysis.<p>The key thing is that this scaled horizontally pretty much forever, since each vehicle had a fixed amount of data per year we could tightly control the performance characteristics of the analysis. Adding more vehicles didn't make things slower, just linearly more expensive.<p>I vaguely remember the data from those containers also being used to process some aggregate analysis (like the each vehicle-container would output some data that would be consumed by another job that did aggregates). But I don't remember the specifics.<p>[1]: I believe we used JSONL or parquet format, but I didn't work in that part of the stack directly
It is an OLAP db. So you can have a pipeline storing data in parquet files in S3. And then use DuckDB to directly query on it.
Then it definitely makes sense. Scientists usually handle a lot of CSV files. Thank you
DuckDB is really neat, recently added PDO interface for it for PHP
<a href="https://github.com/iliaal/pdo_duckdb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iliaal/pdo_duckdb</a><p>Still a bit raw, but getting there
DuckDB is a great example of how far you can get by removing unnecessary layers... Columnar layout and vectorized execution is a powerful combination for OLAP workloads.
I'm just curious - is duckdb too slow for people? This benchmark from clickhouse shows it being fairly slow compared to some options: <a href="https://jsonbench.com/" rel="nofollow">https://jsonbench.com/</a>
That's for their `JSON` data types. In DuckDB it's just a string meaning lots of queries will have to do JSON parsing on every row, but the inserts are very fast. Definitely a bit of a footgun and when you actually just need STRUCT or MAP.<p>There's a talk about ClickHouse's approach from its creator: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHj9mysh0GI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHj9mysh0GI</a> , but the gist is that it maintains (sub)columns to store different paths in the JSON<p>In other ways DuckDB has very good JSON support, like you can do `CREATE TABLE name AS `SELECT * FROM 'data.json';` and it'll infer the schema when possible.
Not just that, you can SELECT * FROM read_json('folder/*') and read an entire schematically consistent folder of json files, or parquet files, or basically anything it supports with its various functions. Duckdb is insanely useful.
Is everything becoming columnar? Parquet stores data per column instead of per row because it improves compression. I get that. Arrow apparently is columnar, and now DuckDB also gets its efficiency by treating data as columns instead of rows?<p>I still need to wrap my head around how that works, but it's a fascinating development.
It depends on your task. In analytics where you need to scan lots of data points within few columns, then columnar storage is very much the best. But for transactional workloads where you have to deal with specific entities, row based would be more advantageous. There are hybrid systems that try to be both at the same time but in my experience they end not doing either very well.
Some day we'll get CREATE TABLE ... ( ... STORAGE ORDER COLUMN MAJOR) to have our transactional cake on the tables that need it and eat our analytics cake on the tables that need that.<p>But until then, separate tools for separate purposes isn't a bad place to be when those tools are both fantastic.
Often used to be referred to as HTAP, and yeah in most data engineering its moving things from OLTP to OLAP forms, and OLAP pretty much always benefit from columnar compression for aggregations and rollups.
BTW, columnar is very similar to struct of arrays (SOA) and some of the reasons it works well overlap with SOA.
compression is a side effect but not really the goal. To simplify, analytical queries often filter on a specific column value, and if these are laid out contiguously it makes disk-level reads much faster than rows that would involve read-skip-read-etc. In transactional systems data is typically written as rows though, so that's likely slower in a columnar system. As a general rule, heavy read workflows with known access patterns is going to benefit from a columnar layout.
Those three things you mentioned kind of live in the same niche - offline data storage and querying. In that world yes everything has become columnar since it’s just better. Row-oriented is still the solution for online streaming use cases.
If DuckDB is so fast and has no data transfer overheads, does it need all this typical SQL machinery with filtering and joining via SELECT queries? Wouldn't it be simpler and faster to return all data to the caller code (all table rows, but only requested columns) and let it perform all other necessary data processing logic?
You’d end up implementing your own home grown version of hash join and query pushdown (skipping parquet row groups entirely) etc and your own home grown heuristics in selecting the right one (planning)<p>Which can outperform a generic solution like this of course, but it’s not less work to make faster for most cases.<p>Also duckdb can give you access to an in memory representation (e.g. `fetch_arrow_table()`) so you have less “language data structure wrapping” overhead. And you can do filtering yourself on that. In most cases the “where” statements will win though.
The SELECT machinery <i>is</i> the product with databases! SQL often the shortest description of the processing logic, and the database has an efficient local execution engine that can prune/reduce data read based on the plan. Very hard to match in app, especially when joins get involved.
DuckDB is a fantastic piece of tech. One of the best, if not the best, I’ve found in several years.
Is duckdb multi region active active?
FTA:<p>> ..In-process means there's no server. You don't connect to DuckDB; you load it as a library inside your program, the same way you'd load NumPy or Polars<p>Does it mean it can perform all statistical computations as well if I want to use for algo trading?
I’m a huge fan, I’ve been wanting to know into the internals. Look forward to digging in.
duckdb is so nice coupled with claude code. It extensive file support and some very interesting decisions on local caching data (like from S3 or snowflake) makes it easy to slice and dice almost any kind of tabular data.
Why is DuckDB so popular when one can use Python + Pandas?<p>Better perf + SQL is that mostly it?
The better question is, why is DuckDB so popular when one can use Polars which has a sane, lintable, typesafe API compared to the mess that is SQL:<p><pre><code> WITH lagged AS (
SELECT
*,
LAG(event_time) OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY event_time) AS prev_time
FROM events
),
sessions AS (
SELECT
*,
SUM(COALESCE((date_diff('minute', prev_time, event_time) > 30)::INT, 1))
OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY event_time) AS session_id
FROM lagged
)
SELECT
user_id,
session_id,
MIN(event_time) AS session_start,
MAX(event_time) AS session_end,
COUNT(*) AS event_count
FROM sessions
GROUP BY ALL
ORDER BY user_id, session_start;
</code></pre>
vs<p><pre><code> result = (
df.sort(["user_id", "event_time"])
.with_columns(
session_id=(
pl.when(pl.col("event_time").diff().is_null())
.then(1)
.when(pl.col("event_time").diff().dt.total_minutes() > 30)
.then(1)
.otherwise(0)
.cum_sum()
.over("user_id")
)
)
.group_by(["user_id", "session_id"])
.agg(
session_start=pl.col("event_time").min(),
session_end=pl.col("event_time").max(),
event_count=pl.col("event_time").count(),
)
.sort(["user_id", "session_start"])
)</code></pre>
Precisely to avoid the custom NIH Polars API, and use SQL which works everywhere (yes, inconsistencies aside).
Polars typesafe? It doesn't show you any errors until runtime right?
Kusto query language is the best I've seen at type safety and I wish open source DBs would steal some ideas from it.
How can you tell if someone is a polars fan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. :)
Polars and duckdb interoperate so it's not really one or the other.<p>Other dataframe libraries work directly on duckdb also, like Ibis.<p>FWIW, I think SQLAlchemy does also.<p>In any case though, I find both the SQL and the code there equally readable.
I really hate SQL as a language for doing data-related tasks, but the core tech for it is often much better in terms of reliability (and is close to having performance parity IME)... specifically for working with larger-than-memory datasets. I think the team at Polars is working on improving larger-than-memory operations though.
I understand the linting aspect but not gonna lie I understood the first one immediately way more than the 2nd one due to knowing SQL well.
"Languages come and go, but SQL is forever"
That does look nicer if you have a Parquet file and want to analyze it. But DuckDB is also a database - if you want a persistent, reliable and mutable data store I don't think Polars would be suitable would it? (Genuine question - you sound like an expert and I'm not.)
The other thing DuckDB does quite well, and which is out of scope for polars, is its keeping of an absolute zoo of external data sources you can query with SQL from the same database client. It's an excellent data warehousing tool.
Why would you prefer Python and Pandas over good old SQL? Pandas is so verbose and hard to debug, most of the times struggle to be performant on small datasets.<p>SQL has been around since the dawn of databases. I am happy to see a trend away from pandas.
Pandas has lots and lots of problems.<p>Performance is definitely one of them, but it also has inconsistent and duplicated methods, inconsistent defaults (e.g. some methods are inplace by default), copy by reference issues, I could go on.<p>It was an early winner in an extremely popular language. That's really the main thing going for it, but alternatives have been a long time coming.
I wrote a blog post a while back to address this question here:
<a href="https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_duckdb/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_duckdb/</a>
I wish this article was not LLM written
What the fuck.<p>I've never been that strong of an engineer. TIL that at one of my internships I was building DuckDB but for the company's private use cases. Well, trying to anyways. I didn't really get the whole picture, the pieces did not fit into place.<p>Didn't get the return offer obviously, probably because I didn't make the connection (or really a coherent narrative of what I was building). RIP. You live and you learn, I guess.
Holy LLM slop article…
> You open a connection, send SQL over TCP (a protocol to send data over a network),<p>Thanks for the clarification, LLM!!
umm can we say it can replace SQLite?
I wouldn’t see it as a replacement.<p>SQLite and DuckDB solve different problems and actually complement each other quite well. SQLite is excellent for transactional workloads (OLTP), while DuckDB shines for analytical workloads (OLAP), especially time-series data and aggregations.<p>We’ve been using both side-by-side in an open-source project for about two years: SQLite for configuration and transactional data, DuckDB for historical sensor data and analytics. So far, it’s been a very good combination.
DuckDB kind of created this false comparison by their own early positioning, but I've tried to charitably interpret it as modeling the spirit and motivations of SQLite, not literally being "the SQLite for Analytics". Aside from both being in-process databases they are very different.
You can even use DuckDB to query SQLite :^)
OLAP vs OLTP. Sure you could use one for the other, but they have ideal use cases. Updating a single record in SQLite is going to be more efficient than doing the same in DuckDB.
They seem similar at a glance but they’re quite different. You can think of SQLite as a transactional database while DuckDB is better used as an analytical database.<p>I can see applications having valid reasons to use both. You can use SQLite as the catalog in duck lake systems, for example. SQLite is your metadata record, DuckDB is your ingestion/scanning/aggregating/joining engine.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
The only reason I know and use DuckDB is because my (internal, private-use-only, experimental) vibe coded projects use it a ton. I didn't pick it - LLMs did. Until this article, I wasn't aware of what it actually is capable of.<p>Most of these projects use JSON(L) files for storage, and duckdb to process them.
If you haven’t investigated storing in parquet format - and it doesn’t break other consumers that need your jsonl formatted files - it could be worth trialling for your use case. You’ll see vastly smaller file sizes (even more so if you use zstd compression), and querying time will shoot up.<p>Usual caveats apply, but as a general rule it’s held up well for me. Only downside is that inspecting the results moves from vi on the output file to duckdb and a select * from.
Yup, especially data backups (although I wouldn't store critical backups like this, only nice-to-have ones). One minor note is that parquet file sizes / compressed sizes can be sensitive to ordering, so you can try different sort orders to get optimal compression.<p>I found with using various tricks I can get the zstd parquet to be up to 10x (or more) smaller than an equivalent Postgres table - but obviously the exact compression ratios will depend on the kind of data you have and how well your Postgres table is normalized.
I'll 100% try DuckDB in more serious projects where I would normally use Sqlite.
What an incredible way to build software