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Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

robinlinacre.com

1–10 of 124 posts

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#3
That's really interesting, I love the idea of being able to use columnar support directly within postgresql.

I was thinking of using Citus for this, but possibly using duckdb is a better way to do. Citus comes with a lot more out of the box but duckdb could be a good stepping stone.

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#4

Being able to use SQL on CSV and json/jsonl files is pretty sweet. Of course it does much more than that, but that's what I do most often with it. Love duckdb.

Indeed! I generally like awk a lot for simpler CSV/TSV processing, but when it comes to cases where you need things like combining/joining multiple CSV files or aggregating for certain columns, SQL really shines IME.

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#6
Agree with the author, will add: duckdb is an extremely compelling choice if you’re a developer and want to embed analytics in your app (which can also run in a web browser with wasm!)

Think this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities like more powerful analytics notebooks like marimo (https://marimo.io/) … and that’s just one example of many.

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#7
I’ve not used duckdb before nor do I do much data analysis so I am curious about this one aspect of processing medium sized json/csv with it: the data are not indexed, so any non-trivial query would require a full scan. Is duckdb so fast that this is never really a problem for most folks?

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#8
post #7

I’ve not used duckdb before nor do I do much data analysis so I am curious about this one aspect of processing medium sized json/csv with it: the data are not indexed, so any non-trivial query would require a full scan. Is duckdb so fast that this is never really a problem for most folks?

Zonemaps are created for columns automatically. I process somewhat large tables w/ duckdb regularly (100M rows) and never have any problems.

Re: Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

#9
post #7

I’ve not used duckdb before nor do I do much data analysis so I am curious about this one aspect of processing medium sized json/csv with it: the data are not indexed, so any non-trivial query would require a full scan. Is duckdb so fast that this is never really a problem for most folks?

Not a duckdb user, but I use polars a lot (mentioned in the article).

Depends on your definition of medium sized, but for tables of hundreds of thousands of rows and ~30 columns, these tools are fast enough to run queries instantly or near instantly even on laptop CPUs.

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