DuckDB: Not Quack Science

Abstract

DuckDB is an open-source SQL database system, geared towards analytical workloads. DuckDB ships a state-of-the-art database architecture as a single package, that is available both as a command line tool and as an in-process library. Uniquely among databases, DuckDB focuses on user experience and portability, making it easy to set up almost anywhere. In this talk, I give a high-level overview of DuckDB. I explain our “friendly SQL” language, which builds on Postgres’ SQL dialect and makes it more ergonomic while staying backwards-compatible. I also present our “friendly CLI”, a command line interface optimized for productivity. I show case studies on how you can process hundreds of GBs of data on your laptop or tens of terabytes on a single server.