It was mentioned that the performance of DuckDB is similar to that of Polars (among others). In that case why would one choose DuckDB over Polars? The only differentiator seems to be that you do the querying with standard SQL instead of the library specific APIs.

- performance is often better, especially on “out of core” (“streaming”, spill to disk data sizes). Polars has done a ton of work on their streaming engine but they’re still catching up

- you don’t need to use Python (but Pythonic wrappers like Ibis exist; disclaimer I worked on Ibis, you can find my blogs on performance comparisons easily there); CLI, WASM, etc. w/o Python

- governance: DuckDB as OSS is setup in a more sustainable way (DuckDB Labs + DuckDB Foundation). while there is a VC-backed company (MotherDuck), it doesn’t employ the primary developers/control the project in the same way the Polars company does

- overall just simplicity and focus. tends to break less, solely focused on single-node, easy to extend, etc. — not trying to do a cloud product, distributing computing, supporting GPU execution