DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade

It seems like the singular benefit is that DuckDB (or similar OLAP models) can quickly handle lots of expensive read queries on large datasets.

It's not a replacement for a traditional RDBMS. I've never used it so I don't know if it's worth the effort to maintain instead of just using a Postgres read-only instance to run analytics queries but somehow I doubt it.

My guess would be that it has a few very specific use cases where it can provide some added benefit. So, I fully expect it to be crammed forcefully into software projects where it provides no tangible benefit for the foreseeable future. Just like cough MongoDB cough.

2 comments

It seems like the singular benefit is that DuckDB (or similar OLAP models) can quickly handle lots of expensive read queries on large datasets.
It's not a replacement for a traditional RDBMS. I've never used it so I don't know if it's worth the effort to maintain instead of just using a Postgres read-only instance to run analytics queries but somehow I doubt it.
My guess would be that it has a few very specific use cases where it can provide some added benefit. So, I fully expect it to be crammed forcefully into software projects where it provides no tangible benefit for the foreseeable future. Just like cough MongoDB cough.
Data scientist here, duckDB is the best. I use it all the time in notebooks where I have a data frame and I want to query it like SQL. In memory duckdb database to the rescue.