No, I just went straight to sqlite. What is duckdb?

One interesting feature of DuckDB is that it can run queries against HTTP ranges of a static file hosted via HTTPS, and there's an official WebAssembly build of it that can do that same trick.

So you can dump e.g. all of Hacker News in a single multi-GB Parquet file somewhere and build a client-side JavaScript application that can run queries against that without having to fetch the whole thing.

You can run searches on https://lil.law.harvard.edu/data-gov-archive/ and watch the network panel to see DuckDB in action.

DuckDB is an open-source column-oriented Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). It's designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases in embedded configuration.

It has transparent compression built-in and has support for natural language queries. https://buckenhofer.com/2025/11/agentic-ai-with-duckdb-and-s...

"DICT FSST (Dictionary FSST) represents a hybrid compression technique that combines the benefits of Dictionary Encoding with the string-level compression capabilities of FSST. This approach was implemented and integrated into DuckDB as part of ongoing efforts to optimize string storage and processing performance." https://homepages.cwi.nl/~boncz/msc/2025-YanLannaAlexandre.p...

It is very similar to SQLite in that it can run in-process and store its data as a file.

It's different in that it is tailored to analytics, among other things storage is columnar, and it can run off some common data analytics file formats.

"What is duckdb?"

duckdb is a 45M dynamically-linked binary (amd64)

sqlite3 1.7M static binary (amd64)

DuckDB is a 6yr-old project

SQLite is a 25yr-old project