Custom CSV Engine csvql Outpaces DuckDB 2.8x on Raw 8 GB File Benchmark
A developer benchmarked their open-source CSV query engine, csvql, against DuckDB v1.4.2 using DuckDB's own NYC taxi dataset and queries — an 8 GB file with 20 million rows. Across four standard aggregation queries on raw CSV, csvql consistently ran approximately 2.8 times faster than DuckDB while using roughly six times less peak memory, around 30 MB versus 200 MB. The comparison was kept fair by having both engines query the raw CSV directly, without DuckDB's faster native columnar storage format. The benchmark also unexpectedly exposed two real bugs in csvql that had gone undetected prior to this testing. The developer noted that csvql's speed advantage is even larger on smaller files, reaching roughly 10x on a 1 million-row sample, but narrows as file size grows due to DuckDB's parallel CSV reader becoming more competitive at scale.
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