Miles Cole puts together a benchmark:
There’s been a lot of excitement lately about single-machine compute engines like DuckDB and Polars. With the recent release of pure Python Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, the excitement about these lightweight native engines has risen to a new high. Out with Spark and in with the new and cool animal-themed engines— is it time to finally migrate your small and medium workloads off of Spark?
Before writing this blog post, honestly, I couldn’t have answered with anything besides a gut feeling largely based on having a confirmation bias towards Spark. With recent folks in the community posting their own benchmarks highlighting the power of these lightweight engines, I felt it was finally time to pull up my sleeves and explore whether or not I should abandon everything I know and become a DuckDB and/or Polars convert.
Read on for the method and results from several thoughtful tests.