Maybe because it's like a swiss army knife for data work, regardless of whether you need it for OLTP or OLAP workloads. Having different SQL dialects is a bit annoying, but the base is the same more or less, so switching doesn't come at too big of a cost.

I haven't tried chDB yet, but I heard about it. Thank you for reminding me of that option.

I use SQL in data pipelines and processing that is going to require interoperability.

But for data exploration, I usually prefer Polars (imo it is easier to work with text, semi-structured data, etc.)

As a huge duckdb fan, I'd love to see chDB to get proper windows support - that would make it real competition (having WASM coverage is already a big step) which would be good for the space as a whole.

Interesting, why do you typically prefer clickhouse local to duckdb?