Getting Started with DuckDB

DuckDB is a fast in-process analytical database. Its ease of use, versatile feature set, and powerful analytical capabilities make DuckDB a valuable addition to the data practitioner’s toolkit. Getting Started with DuckDB offers a practical overview of DuckDB’s fundamentals and guidance for effectively using its powerful capabilities. Through extensive hands-on examples, you’ll learn how to use DuckDB to load, transform, and query a variety of data sources and formats, including CSV, JSON, and Parquet files, semi-structured data, remotely-hosted files, and external databases. You'll also find out how to leverage DuckDB's performance optimizations and friendly SQL enhancements. You'll explore how to use DuckDB’s extensions for specialized applications, such as geospatial analysis and text search over document collections. In addition to working through examples in SQL, Python, and R, you’ll also dive into using DuckDB for analyzing public datasets and discover the wider ecosystem of open-source tools and cloud services that supercharge DuckDB-powered workflows and applications. Whether you’re a seasoned data practitioner or new to working with analytical data, this book will rapidly get you up to speed with DuckDB’s versatile and powerful capabilities, enabling you to apply them in your analytical workflows and projects.