I often saw the question of whether DuckDB runs in production and what the use case would be. With the help of many of you, I explored (https://lnkd.in/ed9-zTys) this over the last few weeks and prepared an extensive guide highlighting real-world DuckDB use cases, categorized into the five categories identified in Part 1.
From Fortune 500 companies processing trillions of security records to innovative startups building interactive data tools, DuckDB is changing how organizations handle analytical workloads.
This guide showcases 15+ use cases with companies such as:
> Atlan - Replaced Spark with DuckDB
> Count - Local database analytics
> Evidence - Universal SQL engine
> Figma - WebAssembly implementation
> FinQore - Financial data pipeline
> GoodData - Analytics platform
> Government of South Australia - Climate change dashboard
> Hex - Notebook-based analytics
> Hugging Face - Dataset access
> Mode - Visual data exploration
> Mosaic - Browser analytics tool
> NSW Department of Education - Data portal
> Observable - Data visualization platform
> Okta - Security data processing
> Rill - Visual analytics platform
> Spare Cores - Cloud infrastructure price comparison service
> Watershed - Carbon footprint analytics
Organizations' benefits from DuckDB were exceptional performance gains, ranging from Watershed's 10x #speedup in carbon analytics to FinQore's lowering pipeline processing time from 8 hours to 8 minutes. Hex saw 5-10x faster notebook execution times, while Okta processed a staggering 7.5 trillion security records across 130 million files using thousands of concurrent DuckDB instances.
Beyond raw performance, companies leveraged DuckDB's #versatility through browser-based analytics with WebAssembly (Figma, Evidence), zero-copy data sharing that eliminated transfer bottlenecks (Hugging Face's 150k+ datasets), and embedded analytics that brought compute directly to applications (Mode, Rill).
These gains came with #reduced operational complexity and costs. Okta cut its data processing expenses while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance.
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All the use cases are explored through 1️⃣ Zero-Copy SQL 2️⃣ Lightweight Analytics 3️⃣ Pipeline Component 4️⃣ Interactive Apps 5️⃣ Secure Enterprise.
Find all links to videos, case studies, blogs, and source code in the relevant chapters. Feel free to use the quick navigation to jump directly to your most exciting example. I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks to all of you who suggested their use case and commented on how you use it at your workplace.
