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by chrisjc 1008 days ago
Databases can usually be split into one of two types; OLTP (row-based) or OLAP (columnar). OLTPs are used mostly for transactional workloads whereas OLAP is mostly used for analytics.

Here goes...

Take 1: sqlite is to Postgres, what duckdb is to Snowflake/BigQuery.

Take 2: In a similar way that sqlite is an in-process/memory OLTP, duckdb is an in-process/memory OLAP.

I should mention some caveats/exceptions/notes about my statements above:

- there are OLAP projects out there that use Postgres as their basis.

- HTAPs are DBs that allow you to define tables as either row-based or columnar.

- duckdb works with sqlite tables, and its SQL is heavily based on postgres SQL

- duckdb 0.9.0 is being released next week :)

- It seems duckdb is poised to become an almost ubiquitous component of the analytical stack. Apache Iceberg, dbt, ...