Simon Willison’s Weblog

25th June 2021 - Link Blog

Querying Parquet using DuckDB (via) DuckDB is a relatively new SQLite-style database (released as an embeddable library) with a focus on analytical queries. This tutorial really made the benefits click for me: it ships with support for the Parquet columnar data format, and you can use it to execute SQL queries directly against Parquet files—e.g. “SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ’taxi_2019_04.parquet’”. Performance against large files is fantastic, and the whole thing can be installed just using “pip install duckdb”. I wonder if faceting-style group/count queries (pretty expensive with regular RDBMSs) could be sped up with this?