# DuckDB 390 Hacker News commenters recommended DuckDB and 53 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 1 years (9 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** An embedded analytical SQL database that makes querying CSV, JSON and Parquet files fast and easy on one machine, though concurrency limits and slow small inserts frustrate some. ## Why people recommend it - Fast, efficient analytical queries (6 comments): "DuckDB is 5x-10x better than SQLite and orders of magnitude simpler/faster than spinning up a dedicated Postgres database." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48328583)) "the duckdb csv parser is the fastest I could find and helped save a data project with hundreds of gigabytes of csv pain" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319844)) "DuckDB will (extremely efficiently) scan the whole table and will blow many other tools out of the water while doing so" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48154797)) - Easy SQL over CSV/JSON/Parquet (6 comments): "It's just so much easier to write sql against csv/json/whatever format data in jupyter/marimo notebooks through duckdb rather than reasoning through pandas." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597036)) "Their csv support coupled with lots of functions and fast & easy iterative data discovery has totally changed how I approach investigation problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652235)) "makes working with random JSON much nicer than SQLite, not least because I can extract JSON fields to dense columnar representations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46502864)) - Scales from laptop to billions (5 comments): "I use DuckDB for nearly everything data related because it's simply the most scalable format/tool/lib from a handful of rows to billions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648976)) "the availability of DuckDB and fast multi core machines with even faster SSDs makes the need for distribution all the more niche" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667299)) "DuckDB can operate well on a wide range of infrastructure and is well suited for operating in resource constrained environments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359866)) - Great for exploration and prototyping (4 comments): "DuckDB has been probably my most used tool in 2026 - if you're comfortable with SQL it's incredible at quickly prototyping and slicing / dicing data." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595109)) "Their csv support coupled with lots of functions and fast & easy iterative data discovery has totally changed how I approach investigation problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652235)) "the ability to do deep investigations on the data as you're designing the pipeline (or when things go wrong) is very useful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668012)) ## What people warn about - Single-process writer concurrency limits (3 comments): "Duckdb has concurrency limits so you can't have a writer and a reader on the same file if they're not the same process" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337978)) "Ingest rates were tough. We partitioned and ran over multiple duckdb instances too (and wrangled the complexity)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763661)) "it's definitely an amazing piece of technology, but it didn't provide the full "database" experience we needed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019909)) - Slow for small, frequent inserts (2 comments): "Ingest rates were tough. We partitioned and ran over multiple duckdb instances too (and wrangled the complexity)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47763661)) "this is still too slow for quick inserts, because duckdb (like all columnar stores) is designed for batches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499246)) - Growing complexity and quirks (3 comments): "I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449650)) "I have a deep appreciation for DuckDB, but I am afraid the confluence of brilliant ideas makes it ever more complicated to adopt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762217)) "It also still has some quirks and foot-guns that need moderately knowledgeable systems people to operate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46502502)) - Bugs and memory problems (3 comments): "Ecosystem is still surprisingly quite young and I end up discovering bugs not made it into official releases yet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47970349)) "impressive that DuckDB managed SF300 with only 8GB RAM, even if query 67 taking 51 minutes is a red flag" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47349615)) "There's something fundamentally wrong with the codebase/architecture if there's so many memory problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867614)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [ClickHouse](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clickhouse.md): 124 recommend - [Trino](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trino.md): 9 recommend - [Exasol](https://hackerapproved.com/p/exasol.md): 8 recommend - [chDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chdb.md): 6 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "DuckDB", https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckdb/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).