ClickHouse also supports a lot of data sources and has a local mode where you just use a single binary with local-only access.

Coincidentally, I wrote an article today on how I use it for similar scenarios. It can fetch from S3, multiple databases at once, and so on.

And you get all the benefits of a database when you need to join or postprocess data from multiple sources.

https://rushter.com/blog/clickhouse-data-processing/

It's more of a common database cli/shell which uses a well defined, and fast, ADBC protocol. You are basically freed from DuckDB's internal handling/runtime of query for various databases. Not to mention, this has vastly more supported databases.

With databow, the query still runs on the target database (unline duckdb), but you get one consistent CLI across different databases: connection profiles, output formats, history, scripting, and import/export behavior.

This is genuinely useful for humans (For example, I regularly juggle 6-7 different database, oltp, olap, search and key-value mixed), and even more useful for AI coding agents, because they don't have to learn and juggle a different CLI and set of flags for every database.

It’s going to have a very big hill to climb if it’s playing in a space where duckdb already has a hold. Duck has probably been my favourite technology find in the last few years. Awesome tech.

I’ll still check this out though.

I think the advantage is simplicity. Why connect first to duckdb and attach the db when you can query it directly with ADBC which is guaranteed to be fast

This is my question too