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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    DuckDB is fast for some specific workloads. 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.

    [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.

    by romaniv
  • 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.
    by jdw64
  • > 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.

    by steve_adams_86
  • 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
    by anitil
  • 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/

    by smithclay
  • 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.
    by globalise83
  • DuckDB is amazing for any sort of fast data analysis when the data is small enough that it can fit on your laptop

    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

    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

    Other engineers that had never touched DuckDB were so impressed with how easy it is for AI agents to write queries on our dataset

    by 0xferruccio
  • 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.
    by axegon_

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