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dopidopHN • 05/03/2025 • 1 reply • view on HN

I’m very familiar with Postgres and spinning one with postgis seems easy enough. Do I get more with duckdb?

Most of the time I store locations and compute distance to them. Would that being faster to implement with duckdb

Replies

wenc • 05/04/2025

Probably no difference for your use-case (ST_Distance). If you already have data in Postgres, you should continue using Postgis.

In my use case, I use DuckDB because of speed at scale. I have 600GBs of lat-longs in Parquet files on disk.

If I wanted to use Postgis, I would have to ingest all this data into Postgres first.

With DuckDB, I can literally drop into a Jupyter notebook, and do this in under 10 seconds, and the results come back in a flash: (no need to ingest any data ahead of time)

  import duckdb
  duckdb.query("INSTALL spatial; LOAD spatial;")
  duckdb.query("select ST_DISTANCE(ST_POINT(lng1, lat1), ST_POINT(lng2, lat2)) dist from '/mydir/*.parquet'")
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