32
Articles
Plus 41 short updates, originally posted to
LinkedIn, kept here for the record.
Complete index — 2014–2026
Everything, in the order it happened.
Writing about data engineering, infrastructure, and the tools I build.
DuckDB Upgrade Speed, Measured from 110M Extension Loads
Nine months of telemetry from Query.Farm's DuckDB extensions — 110 million loads — show each release landing slower than the one before it. Fourteen days in, v1.5.0 reached 33.7% of the population I can see; v1.5.5 reached 12.1%. The decline survives excluding CI traffic, excluding the v1.4 LTS line, and restricting to patch releases only. DuckDBWho Actually Runs DuckDB, Measured from 110M Extension Loads
The companion to my post on DuckDB upgrade speed. Once you strip out the CI traffic that is 70% of my telemetry, the extension catalog isn't the monopoly the load counts imply or the flat field the raw config-days imply — and a third of real installations turn out to be on a desktop. DuckDBPaging Through a Parquet File in DuckDB: file_row_number or OFFSET?
You have a large Parquet file and an API that has to return its contents, but responses have a size ceiling, so the caller pages through it. LIMIT/OFFSET is the obvious way to write that and it is the wrong one. I measured file_row_number against it: 2.53x faster on a file with 163 row groups. Speed is the boring half of the answer. OFFSET will also hand back the wrong rows without telling you. DuckDBA DuckDB Release Isn't a Distribution
When DuckDB ships a new version, every community extension has to be rebuilt against it before anyone can install one. I measured how much of the catalog is actually there when a release lands, how long extension updates take to merge, and why the same builds run 2.5x faster on different CI. The answer to all three is distribution work. DuckDBCompiling Isn't Running: Functionally Testing DuckDB-WASM Extensions
A DuckDB extension that compiles for WebAssembly has only proven that it compiles. Whether it loads, and whether it actually runs, are separate questions. I built a Node harness to ask them across 124 community extensions. Here's what it found and the fixes that came out of it. DuckDBQuack and VGI: Two Approaches to Bringing RPC to DuckDB
Quack — the new client/server protocol extension for DuckDB — was announced today. It's been built since November 2025, almost exactly as long as I've been building VGI. Here's what's interesting, what's surprising, and where the two projects converge and diverge. DuckDBDuckDB ↔ Arrow Compatibility: A Status Page
A working status page for the Arrow-related issues and PRs I've filed against duckdb/duckdb — the UNION saga, schema/data disagreements in nested appenders, type fidelity through round-trips, and the bigger question of how defensive the C Data Interface should be. Data EngineeringGeoSilo vs GeoArrow + Byte Stream Split: Two Approaches to Geometry Compression
A detailed comparison of GeoSilo's delta-integer encoding against GeoArrow's columnar float64 layout with Parquet BYTE_STREAM_SPLIT, covering compression ratios, precision tradeoffs, and when each approach wins. Data EngineeringVGI Injector: A Tiny HTTPS Download-and-Execute Binary in Zig
I needed a self-contained binary that downloads a program over HTTPS and exec's it — small enough to run in a FROM scratch container with nothing else. Go and Rust couldn't get small enough. Zig could. ProgrammingTIME Data Type Compatibility Across Databases
A survey of the TIME data type across 14 databases, comparing supported ranges, maximum values, and whether the special value 24:00:00 is accepted. Data EngineeringShowing 1–10 of 32
41
Short updates
Originally posted to LinkedIn. Kept here so the record is complete;
they carry noindex.
Short updates
I built a thing for runners and walkers who are tired of checking five weather apps before...
I'm teaching a hands-on DuckDB Extension Development Workshop in Amsterdam on January 30th
Announcing the ADBC Scanner Extension for DuckDB
The DuckDB extension workshop in Amsterdam this January is already completely full—it filled up...
Big Update to the DuckDB crypto Extension!
Deep Dive into DuckDB Extensions — Let's Workshop in Person!
Excited to share something very cool with the DuckDB + Arrow Flight community.
I've been deep in Kafka + DuckDB development the past few weeks, but here are some late-night...
Excited to announce the Inflector Extension for DuckDB by Query.Farm!
Help support Query.Farm!
Showing 1–10 of 41