I've been following DuckDB for a while now, and even tinkered with a layer on top called "IceDB" (totally needs a rewrite: https://blog.danthegoodman.com/introducing-icedb--a-serverle...)

The issue I see now is that there is no good way to know what files will match well when reading from remote (decoupled) storage.

While it does support hive partitioning (thank god), and S3 list calls, if you are looking at doing inserts frequently you need some way to merge these parquet files.

The MergeTree engine is my favorite thing about ClickHouse, and why it's still my go-to. I think if there was a serverless way to merge parquet (which was the aim of IceDB) that would make DuckDB massively more powerful as a primary OLAP db.