Duckdb Can Be 5x Faster Than Spark at 500m Record Files
Posted3 months ago
blog.dataexpert.ioTechstory
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DuckdbApache SparkData ProcessingDatabase Performance
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Duckdb
Apache Spark
Data Processing
Database Performance
The article compares DuckDB and Apache Spark, claiming DuckDB can be significantly faster for certain data processing tasks, sparking interest in the HN community about the potential advantages and limitations of DuckDB.
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Sep 29, 2025 at 2:05 PM EDT
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A bit of an obvious one - small data tech is faster at small data. It serves more of a lower bound reminder of what "small data" is nowadays.
The article rightly starts with:
> Processing power on laptops has increased dramatically over the last twenty years. This allows single laptops to accomplish what we needed multi-node Spark clusters to do ten years ago.