HN

Comments (77)

• axegon_
  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.
• Menu

  smithclay
  If you're reading this and curious: consider writing a duckdb community extension* or contributing to an existing one*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.* https://github.com/duckdb/extension-template * https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/
• Menu

  0xferruccio
  DuckDB is amazing for any sort of fast data analysis when the data is small enough that it can fit on your laptopRecently 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 themAnother 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 transcriptsOther engineers that had never touched DuckDB were so impressed with how easy it is for AI agents to write queries on our dataset
• Menu

  anitil
  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
• Menu

  steve_adams_86
  > DuckDB has received widespread adoption because it's just so damn easy to use.This was a major factor in my initial adoption. Since then it has stuck because it’s also absurdly capable, versatile, and fast.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.
• Menu

  willtemperley
  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.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.DuckDB is excellent, but it’s more a black box than a library.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.
• Menu

  jdw64
  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.
• Menu

  mcv
  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?I still need to wrap my head around how that works, but it's a fascinating development.
• bunsenhoneydew
  DuckDB is a fantastic piece of tech. One of the best, if not the best, I’ve found in several years.
• Menu

  Panzerschrek
  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?
• Menu

  snissn
  I'm just curious - is duckdb too slow for people? This benchmark from clickhouse shows it being fairly slow compared to some options: https://jsonbench.com/
• pknerd
  FTA:> ..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 PolarsDoes it mean it can perform all statistical computations as well if I want to use for algo trading?
• Menu

  tobyhinloopen
  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.Most of these projects use JSON(L) files for storage, and duckdb to process them.
• Menu

  holografix
  Why is DuckDB so popular when one can use Python + Pandas?Better perf + SQL is that mostly it?
• Menu

  codingbear
  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.
• thefourthchime
  I’m a huge fan, I’ve been wanting to know into the internals. Look forward to digging in.
• f311a
  I wish this article was not LLM written
• Menu

  pknerd
  umm can we say it can replace SQLite?
• pierregillesl
  [dead]
• kunal183
  [flagged]
• Omniloop
  [flagged]
• gordonwu8383
  [dead]
• charanmilan
  [flagged]