TLDR Tech / Data
The Practical Limits of DuckDB on Commodity Hardware
DuckDB delivers warehouse-style, columnar analytics with sub-second performance on datasets up to 5 million rows and remains comfortably interactive for GROUP BY and percentile queries up to 10 million rows, even on $500 laptops (16GB RAM). On this setup, window functions become noticeably slower beyond 10M rows (1.7s at 5M, 6s at 10M, ~1 minute at 50M rows). Memory usage remains modest (<1.2GB for 50M rows), making the 1M-20M zone the sweet spot for local interactive analytics with DuckDB on consumer laptops.
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