Simon Willison’s Weblog

19th September 2020 - Link Blog

DuckDB (via) This is a really interesting, relatively new database. It’s kind of a weird hybrid between SQLite and PostgreSQL: it uses the PostgreSQL parser but models itself after SQLite in that databases are a single file and the code is designed for use as an embedded library, distributed in a single amalgamation C++ file (SQLite uses a C amalgamation). It features a “columnar-vectorized query execution engine” inspired by MonetDB (also by the DuckDB authors) and is hence designed to run analytical queries really quickly. You can install it using “pip install duckdb”—the resulting module feels similar to Python’s sqlite3, and follows roughly the same DBAPI pattern.