137 pointsby janandonly8 hours ago12 comments
  • NorthSouthNorthan hour ago
    I had a project a year ago that worked with lots and lots of csv files and it was just such a lifesaver. Doing a JOIN and WHERE on two (massive) csv files and getting instant results felt like magic. Saved me a lot of time on ad hoc queries. Also Claude being good with the tool is a bonus too. Easily my favourite piece of software recently.
  • fzumstein7 hours ago
    DuckDB also runs in Excel, by the way, via the free xlwings Lite add-in that you can install from the add-in store. It’s using the Python package and allows to write scripts, custom functions, as well as use a Jupyter-like notebook workflow.
  • mmarian4 hours ago
    It's been a lifesaver for some analysis I had to do on 70GB of Cloudflare logs.
    • steve_adams_864 hours ago
      I'd be lost without it for log analysis. It's like a swiss army knife for making sense of disparate or large sets of data. So easy to pull up, so cooperative with data that's easy to compose from curl and bash, etc. It makes life so much easier
      • mmarian4 hours ago
        Yep. And easy to reuse as well since it's just SQL.
  • uwemaurer7 hours ago
    I benchmarked DuckDB 1.5.2 with the latest Java JDBC driver which now supports user defined functions. This allows very fast modifications https://sqg.dev/blog/java-duckdb-benchmark/
  • yolo30003 hours ago
    So is DuckDb a database or a cli tool to query all sorts of file format using SQL statements? I've used it as a CLI tool, somehow don't understand the comparison to a database, which stores your data reliably, besides responding to your SQL queries.
    • mmarian3 hours ago
      My personal use case is a replacement for pandas for ad hoc analysis in Jupyter notebooks, which I have to do very often these days. If I had to store the data I'd pick S3+Glue+Athena.
    • simonw3 hours ago
      It can act as an in-process database, like SQLite. You can import the library directly into your code.
    • biophysboy2 hours ago
      Along with parsing various file formats, you can create duckdb files to store tables, and make related views, schema, etc. They also have a newer ducklake tool
  • gigatexal5 hours ago
    Data engineer here: I use this all the time. It's amazing. For most of the data the sizes we often deal with it's perfect.
    • goerch5 hours ago
      > For most of the data the sizes we often deal with it's perfect.

      Interested here: for me it works for out of core work. Where is the limit? On a related note: do you need to handle concurrency restrictions?

  • whalesalad8 hours ago
    duckdb is a generational technology innovation. insanely good ergonomics, great performance, it's awesome.
    • goerch7 hours ago
      Can confirm: together with `dbt` and `rill` I'm able do to [this](https://github.com/idesis-gmbh/GitHubExperiments/blob/master...) on my laptop.
      • steve_adams_867 hours ago
        Whoa, nice! I could see this being useful to people I work with. Do you think it would be a good setup for people who are technical but not great software developers? People who use basic R and Python for ETL and analysis, mostly.
        • goerch7 hours ago
          I'm using DuckDB in another project (on my laptop) where `NetworkX` fails due to the memory limit of 32 GB. So yes, as soon as you are doing out of core work I'd assume the combination to be quite powerful. Knowledge in SQL would be a plus, though.
      • esafak6 hours ago
        Why did you pick rill?
        • goerch6 hours ago
          It is a educational/R&D type project. We are more of backend developers and `rill` worked fine as a rapid visualization frontend with low learning curve for us.

          Edit: still realizing that I can't use markdown on HN...

      • rick12906 hours ago
        is rill open source?
    • meetingthrower5 hours ago
      I got introduced to it by Claude the other day as I was interrogating several GB of public csv files. Seemed magical as it out them all in parquet files and transformed what I needed into the normalized sqllite for my server. Coding agents seen quite comfortable with it!
      • whalesalad5 hours ago
        claude + duckdb combo is legendary for doing quick analysis of huge datasets. every time i need to analyze a big ass csv (200mb+) or as you noted a parquet file or really anything columnar i'll tell claude, 'you have duckdb at your disposal for this' and within minutes it's all sorted (no pun intended)
    • steve_adams_867 hours ago
      I use it almost daily. Any time I benchmark changes or analyze logs, I collect the data I need as CSV and analyze it with duckdb. The flexibility and ease makes it so I find so much more interesting information. It's indispensable to me now
  • ramraj075 hours ago
    Did they finally enable full SIMD or keep insisting its okay not to have it?
    • goerch5 hours ago
      Hm, our internal benchmarking shows something like a 30x speedup compared to SQLite (https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench shows an even greater speedup due to not considering cache size). Calculating back on the envelope I'd estimate 8x for multithreading and 4x for SIMD. Should we expect even more?
    • gigatexal5 hours ago
      fwiw:

      "Performance Does DuckDB use SIMD? DuckDB does not use explicit SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions because they greatly complicate portability and compilation. Instead, DuckDB uses implicit SIMD, where we go to great lengths to write our C++ code in such a way that the compiler can auto-generate SIMD instructions for the specific hardware. As an example why this is a good idea, it took 10 minutes to port DuckDB to the Apple Silicon architecture."

      https://duckdb.org/faq

  • andrewstuart4 hours ago
    I found it unusable due to out of memory errors with a billion row 8 column dataset.

    It needs manual tuning to avoid those errors and I couldn’t find the right incantation, nor should I need to - memory management is the job of the db, not me. Far too flakey for any production usage.

    • goerch4 hours ago
      That sounds like a rather serious application. Did you file an issue?
      • andriy_koval2 hours ago
        I filed many issues. They were aurtoclosed after 3 months of inactivity
      • andrewstuart4 hours ago
        No, I tried Clickhouse instead, which worked without crashing or manual memory tuning.

        Search the issues of the duckdb GitHub there’s at least 110 open and closed oom (out of memory) and maybe 400 to 500 that reference “memory”.

        • goerch4 hours ago
          > Search the issues of the duckdb GitHub there’s at least 110 open and closed oom (out of memory) and maybe 400 to 500 that reference “memory”.

          Ah, missed this the first time around. Will check this out. And yes, I noticed that DuckDB rather aggressively tries to use the resources of your computer.

        • goerch4 hours ago
          Understood: SQLite is to Postgres as DuckDB is to ClickHouse.
          • andrewstuart4 hours ago
            I don’t see the analogy, if you’re using it to excuse crashing on small data sets and indexes.

            SQLite isn’t small and crashy, it’s small and reliable.

            There’s something fundamentally wrong with the codebase/architecture if there’s so many memory problems.

            And the absolute baseline requirement for a production database is no crashes.

            • ciupicri3 hours ago
              I think the authors disagree with me, but I see it like a online analytical processing (OLAP) database, not like a OLTP (online transaction processing) database, so crashes are more tolerable.
            • goerch4 hours ago
              Agree with your assessment of small and reliable for SQLite. Disagree with your baseline requirement. ACID is more important for me and does not contain `No crashes`.
  • porridgeraisin3 hours ago
    I use duckdb often too, but the way it is being hyped in these comments makes me feel like I'm missing out on some insane usecase.

    I basically use it to load csv, jsonl, parquet etc etc formats and do arbitrary transformations. Are people doing something else with it?

    • goerch3 hours ago
      Maybe you are unconsciously doing the right thing(TM) already? So try doing it with SQLite instead :)
    • mmarian3 hours ago
      Probably because you probably don't have to do those arbitrary transformations that often. I do, being in a security-related role. But I wouldn't have recognized its usefulness in my previous roles as a front/backend dev.
  • esafak7 hours ago
    Any opinions on DuckLake?
    • erikcw4 hours ago
      I’ve had very good experience with it last year. I used it at large scale with data that had been in iceberg previously and it worked flawlessly. It’s only improved since. Highly recommend.
    • uniqueuid4 hours ago
      The problem space that ducklake solves is smaller, but it helped me to get a working metabase dashboard quickly on ~1tb of data with 128gb ram. Queries were much, much faster than all alternatives.

      Some downsides are: No unique constraints with indexes (can accidentally shoot yourself in the foot with double ingestion), writing is a bit cumbersome if you already have parquet files.

    • mmarian3 hours ago
      With my enterprise hat on, I'd say Athena + S3 is good enough. Only use DuckDB for ad hoc analysis.
    • denom7 hours ago
      Seems stable enough, they patched a bunch of things.
  • syngrog663 hours ago
    sqlite