Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work (duckdb.org)

[flagged]

This is such a long waited feature!

DuckDB is trending towards becoming a query engine, specifically the fastest analytical query engine. This is very good.

Do they have SSL updates yet? Signing is great, but using https means not fighting firewalls to start a job

Using 512gb of ram for a 22gb remote file does feel a bit weird for a benchmark but maybe they couldn’t get a large number of cores without lots of memory?

I wonder how this would work in trying to parallelize the worker threads (multiple duckdb instances) coordinating them via Quack.

Ducks all the way down!

[flagged]

Does having the worker pool hold as many threads as cores work well alongside the async pool? It is basically oversubscribed by design.

I built a system once which had (this is Rust) a Rayon worker thread pool of 4 threads and a Tokio async pool of 2 (multithreaded runtime). On a system of 6 vCPU. This ended up working fine. Tokio was not starved so handled network requests at low latency.

One difference is DuckDB is a pure network client. If one of its async threads is starved it is not the end of the world (e.g. k8s does not kill your pod for failure of replying to health checks).

is there any aggregator for official docs such as this for db/systems/distributed arch at scale?

Do the CSV files allow quoted newlines? If yes, what's the trick to avoid checking the whole file too find out whether a newline is quoted or a record separator when reading it from the middle in an async thread?

Tested on a dev env (t3.nano) with a rather challenging query (500 rather evenly distributed items) on a file with ~70m rows w/ about 576 row groups.

version 1.4.4: 31.89s

preview: 4.42s