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Comment by archiewood | Hacker News Reader

DuckDB is really having a moment

The ecosystem is very active, and they have recently opened up "community extensions" to bring your own functions, data types and connections. A barrier at the moment is that extensions are written in C++, though this limitation should be removed soon.

I've been building a lot on top of DuckDB, two of the projects I'm working on are linked in the article:

- Evidence (https://evidence.dev): Build data apps with SQL + Markdown

- DuckDB GSheets (https://duckdb-gsheets.com): Read/Write Google Sheets via DuckDB

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I'm using DuckDB for the first time for this year's Advent of Code and it's been a delightful experience so far. I was looking for something simple to set up and had more advanced functionality than what SQLite supports.

Extraordinary!

I can’t think of any of the advent of code questions this year where a database would have been of any use.

Do tell us more.

It's mostly a challenge I set for myself to see how far I could get using SQL! I've done the past couple years in Python and just wanted to change it up.

So far parsing the inputs has not been nearly as much of a hassle as I thought. I really like how DuckDB supports directly selecting from files (e.g. `select * from 'file.csv'`). I thought I was going to be spending more time creating schemas, running `copy`, etc.

Overall pretty nice quality of life experience so far, even if it is only to mess around with a few puzzles.

You could try participating in Advent of SQL[0]! It's a bit rough around the edges but fun nonetheless. [0] - https://adventofsql.com/

Duckdb is really great. DX is awesome.

I cloned the CVE repository and ingested it into duckdb without worrying about table structures. Build a fastapi wrapper to query CVEs like SQL. A little bit of caching and it was pretty fast. Was done in a few hours.

Shame that their Rust crate wasn't as performant as the python module.

I really enjoy using DuckDB for data visualization. It’s so easy to work with that it’s even come in handy during a few Twitter arguments—where I might have given up before, I was able to back myself up with data in just a few minutes. That's not even evidence.dev, just built-ins. https://duckdb.org/docs/sql/functions/char.html#barx-min-max.... We also use it at work for working with Parquet. Huge fan

this sound interesting - do you have any more samples on how you win twitter arguments with this?

Are the testimonials on your website real or fake? Apple, Flexport, BMW, etc are using evidence.dev?

Lots of folks out there use evidence.dev. It's a simple way to get some BI up and running without needing to deal with licensing / corporate IT, etc.

Remember all it takes is 1 employee to put that claim up there (although I do like evidence.dev).

To be precise, it takes 1 employee to say "used in X". It takes corporate decision to say "used by X". And it takes a written agreement to be able to use the trademarked logo of X on your page. (I know, because I have collected more than 60 such agreements to show logos on a page).

I got into DuckDb thanks to HN comments like these in general, it really shines for doing "desktop" analysis that goes beyond the usual Excel/Numbers shenanigans.

The Developer Voices podcast episode with a couple authors of a DuckDB book was quite good as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nA3uDx1rlg

Wow. Evidence is the sort of thing I've been dreaming of for a long time. Awesome work!

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