17 engineers on Hacker News describe using DuckDB first-hand: 9 endorse it, 0 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“It's very fast, especially on a decent sized cloud VM and when querying Iceberg. I've been running the alpha in production as a centralized analytics server”
endorse · production · nicoritschel · 2026-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we can shove ~2-3 million rows to a browser based query engine in 16-20Mb with duckdb-wasm.”
endorse · production · gopalv · 2026-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DuckDB for us is a pure read-only service pipe.”
mixed · production · aynyc · 2026-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Lots of places where we replaced Pandas with DuckDB for transformations. It's way faster”
endorse · production · staticautomatic · 2026-08-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“with CTEs, temp tables, and DuckDB's higher-order functions, it ended up being dramatically clearer than the original sprawl of code.”
endorse · production · mkmccjr · 2025-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Very nice for very fast local queries (against parquet files, i ignored their homegrown file format)”
endorse · personal · theLiminator · 2025-01-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Duckdb just smashes everything else, at least on our data.”
endorse · production · koromak · 2024-06-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“DuckDB has the performance of Snowflake for a fraction of the cost. It may not scale as well, but 99% of companies don't need the sort of scale Snowflake pitches.”
endorse · production · mritchie712 · 2024-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're also using duckdb in prod and the performance is phenomenal.”
endorse · production · whalesalad · 2023-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I would prefer a default that does not download anything from the internet (especially .so files), but that's quite easy to change when you know it.”
mixed · production · motiejus · 2023-09-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I used duckdb successfully in prod to replace SQL Server... Replacing with DuckDB made things much lighter and faster. The only issue I faced is the case sensitivity”
mixed · production · meitham · 2023-05-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used DuckDB for a couple of workloads which needed more complicated queries, it's stupid quick.”
endorse · production · thesketh · 2022-04-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using django & duckdb together, which keeps me from using the ORM.”
neutral · personal · biophysboy · 2025-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“SQLFlow is a service that embeds DuckDB as the storage and processing brains.”
neutral · production · dm03514 · 2025-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using DuckDB similarly and loving the simplicity.”
neutral · personal · wild_egg · 2024-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use the native duckdb format for intermediate processing (during pipeline execution)”
neutral · production · RobinL · 2024-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a 1 server setup where we run duckdb and Python scripts”
neutral · production · kfk · 2023-08-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?