How One Developer Uses DuckDB and Parquet to Run Fast Analytics on a SQLite Site

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A developer running TrendVidStream, a multi-region YouTube trending discovery site, built a lightweight analytics pipeline on top of a minimal shared-hosting setup using PHP 8.4, SQLite, and cron jobs. The production SQLite database handles page serving and full-text search well, but proved unsuitable for complex analytical queries due to shared-host CPU limits and the absence of historical snapshots. To solve this, the developer built a nightly export of key database tables into hive-partitioned Parquet files, transferred via FTP, and queried locally using DuckDB. The entire pipeline spans roughly 120 lines of PHP and SQL, reducing exploratory queries that once took 20 minutes down to around four seconds. DuckDB was chosen for its ability to read Parquet natively, support window functions, and run as a single binary with no server infrastructure required.

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