Comment by romaniv
8 hours ago
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.
The article has an explanation for what kind of database it is. After reading that one sentence you wouldn't write the second paragraph.
> it's optimized for the kind of queries that scan millions of rows to filter, aggregate, and join — not the kind that look up a single record by primary key
I’m sure the use of duckdb may seem weird for normal developers, but for data people it really is game-changing, especially for data scientists or business analysts.
I'm going to sound like a broken record but... different use cases. They're analogous in the comparison "sqlite for analytics" but completely different architectures and implementations. Part of this is the fault of the developers, but I feel they were trying to highlight the similar focus on in-process, zero dependencies, simplicity and test coverage - not a direct "vs" comparison. IME recursive queries in analytical workflows are not very common; they typically work against the fundamental data layout on disk.
SQLite is awesome and I would love to see more posts about it, but the reality is one of the major reasons it's awesome is the no-drama/stability/it just works. DuckDB is seeing a lot of development on many fronts so there's a lot more to learn and talk about right now.
> while DuckDB effectively appeared on the scene two years ago.
duckdb is ~7 years old by now. it was quite popular long before it became 1.0. heck, even motherduck has been founded 4 years ago.
> DuckDB is fast for some specific workloads
Yes, it's specifically promoted as DBMS for OLAP workload. And it's usually compared to ClickHouse, another analytical DBMS. So people who use it know why it's good.