Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite • Hacker News Board

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#11

Post by nickpeterson » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

knuckleheads wrote: post #8

I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?

Do you think venture capital firms are made of money?

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#12

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

knuckleheads wrote: post #8

I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?

AI comments aren't allowed on HN. AI submissions are.

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#13

Post by cynicalsecurity » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

Great job on comparing apples to oranges. DuckDB is a columnar OLAP engine, SQLite is row-oriented OLTP. DuckDB should stomp SQLite in that particular use case.

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#14

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

Title, which is already synthetic, should be "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite for Analytics Workloads".

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#15

Post by ray_v » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #5

> DuckDB's columnar engine That is workload specific. Title should be "Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite for Analytics" IMHO

Yes - it's a specific workload for sure. SQLite is still the GOAT when it comes to OLTP, but DuckDB is really becoming the GOAT in the OLAP world - I think DuckDB is simply amazing and truly an amazing piece of technology for anyone working with large amounts of data.

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#16

Post by otterley » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

AI slop. The content might be valuable but the framing makes it too painful to read.

Please, folks, write with your own voice -- especially if it's for your business blog. It's good for you as an author (practice makes perfect) and it's good for your readers (whom you want to influence).

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#17

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #12

knuckleheads wrote: post #8

I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?

AI comments aren't allowed on HN. AI submissions are.

It would still be nice to mark them.

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#18

Post by ethin » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

How are these two DB engines even comparable other than at the edges? They handle two completely separate workload types: one is more a general-purpose DB engine and the other is specifically for columnar datasets, analytics and the like -- of course a hand-tuned DB engine is going to destroy SQLite on any reasonable benchmark: SQLite wouldn't be optimized for that hand-tuned use-case whereas something like DuckDB is.

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#19

Post by shubhamjain » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

Despite its obvious advantages, the biggest drawback of DuckDB is its concurrency model [1]. If a process opens a database in read-write mode, it acquires an exclusive lock on the file. This prevents even simple read operations from other processes as long as the writer remains open. Maybe there's a simple workaround I haven't come across, but I found it to be quite a productivity killer.

So yes, all these benchmarks are great, but it wasn't so fun working with DuckDB when I had to close duckdb cli, just so a query in another script could run.

[1]: https://duckdb.org/docs/current/connect/concurrency

Re: Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite

#20

Post by ethin » Wed, Jul 29, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

nickpeterson wrote: post #11

knuckleheads wrote: post #8

I ran this through an AI checker and it flagged half of it immediately. @dang, I know Substack just enabled Pangram integration, is there anyway you could get Y Combinator to spring for a Pangram subscription for the front page or something ?

Do you think venture capital firms are made of money?

Yes? They certainly act like they are...