100% agree. One of the biggest assets we had at <driver and rider marketplace app> was the data we collected. We built models on it that would determine how markets were run and whether drivers and passengers were safe. These were key features that enabled us to bring a quality service to customers (over ye ol' taxi). The same applied to the autonomous cars, bikes, and scooters. We used data to improve placement of vehicles to help us anticipate and meet demand. It was insane how much data used to build these models.

To say big data is dead sounds to me like someone desperate for eyeballs.

I do think there is a huge opportunity for DuckDB - running analytics on 'not quite big data' is a market that has always existed and is arguably growing. I've seen way too many people trying to use Postgres for analyzing 10 Billion row tables and people booting up an EMR cluster to hit the same 10 Billion rows. There is a huge sweet spot for DuckDB here were you can grab a slice of the data you are interested in, take it home and slice and dice it as you please on your local computer. I did this just this weekend on DuckDB _and_ ClickHouse!

Disclaimer: I work at a company that is entirely based on ClickHouse.