It's kind of a cross between SQLite and columnar analytical databases such as Snowflake or Cassandra.

You can run it happily on a laptop, but because it's column oriented it can calculate aggregates (group by/count queries for example) incredibly fast - so it's better for a lot of analytical workloads than regular row-oriented databases.

I have some initial notes from trying it out here: https://til.simonwillison.net/duckdb/parquet

For instance, in Python, it can be installed using `pip install duckdb`. For things like unit tests, it can be very valuable because no additional services need to be running.