sqlite_scanner VS postgres_scanner

It's not a dumb question at all. I'm pretty knowledgeable with DBs and still find it very difficult to understand how many of these front-end/pass-through engines work.

Checkout Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers. That might be the most well known approach for accessing one database through another. The Supabase team wrote an interesting piece about this recently.

https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-foreign-data-wrappers-rus...

You might also want to try out duckdb's approach to reading other DBs (or DB files). They talk about how they can "import" a sqlite DB in the above 0.7.0 announcement, but also have some other examples in their duckdblabs github project. Check out their "...-scanner" repos:

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

DuckDB can actually read SQLite or Postgres directly! In the SQLite case, something like Litestream plus DuckDB could work really well!

Also, with Pyarrow's help, DuckDB can already do this with Delta tables!

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgresscanner

Excellent question! I'll jump in - I am a part of the DuckDB team though, so if other users have thoughts it would be great to get other perspectives as well.

First things first - we really like quite a lot about the SQLite approach. DuckDB is similarly easy to install and is built without dependencies, just like SQLite. It also runs in the same process as your application just like SQLite does. SQLite is excellent as a transactional database - lots of very specific inserts, updates, and deletes (called OLTP workloads). DuckDB can also read directly out of SQLite files as well, so you can mix and match them! (https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlitescanner)

DuckDB is much faster than SQLite when doing analytical queries (OLAP) like when calculating summaries or trends over time, or joining large tables together. It can use all of your CPU cores for sometimes ~100x speedup over SQLite.

DuckDB also has some enhancements with respect to data transfer in and out of it. It can natively read Pandas, R, and Julia dataframes, and can read parquet files directly also (meaning without inserting first!).

Does that help? Happy to add more details!

I've created an ODBC DuckDB extension to query any database that has an ODBC driver. It's modeled after the fantastic official Postgres scanner extension https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner.

It supports fetching rowsets in batches to minimize network overhead and defaults to the default DuckDB vector size of 2048.

I've tested it against the IBM DB2 & Postgres ODBC drivers and will continue to test and add support for all major databases. If you've got one you'd like to see let me know in the comments.

I've got plenty of improvements in the pipeline including:

It's not a dumb question at all. I'm pretty knowledgeable with DBs and still find it very difficult to understand how many of these front-end/pass-through engines work.

Checkout Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers. That might be the most well known approach for accessing one database through another. The Supabase team wrote an interesting piece about this recently.

https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-foreign-data-wrappers-rus...

You might also want to try out duckdb's approach to reading other DBs (or DB files). They talk about how they can "import" a sqlite DB in the above 0.7.0 announcement, but also have some other examples in their duckdblabs github project. Check out their "...-scanner" repos:

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

Doesn't postgres have a columnar option? If so, you could prob get better performance for your analytical interactions if you switched some tables to columnar.

Otherwise check out postgres scanner. https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgres_scanner

DuckDB can actually read SQLite or Postgres directly! In the SQLite case, something like Litestream plus DuckDB could work really well!

Also, with Pyarrow's help, DuckDB can already do this with Delta tables!

https://github.com/duckdblabs/sqlite_scanner

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgresscanner

Interesting thought! I have not tried this yet so I only have a guess as an answer. Could you export the data as SQL statements and then run those statements on DuckDB? That may be easier to set up, but may take longer to run...

DuckDB also has the ability to read Postgres data directly, and there is a Postgres FDW that can read from DuckDB!

https://github.com/duckdblabs/postgresscanner

https://github.com/alitrack/duckdb_fdw