In today's data landscape, the gap between local data exploration and large-scale cloud warehousing can be vast and expensive. This session introduces DuckDB, the "SQLite for analytics," and demonstrates how it powers a revolutionary approach to data processing. We'll explore what it means to be an in-process OLAP database and how this architecture provides blazing-fast analytical power directly on your laptop.
Building on this foundation, we'll demystify the data lakehouse paradigm—a modern architecture that merges the flexibility of data lakes with the performance of data warehouses. You'll see how DuckLake, the practical application of this pattern using DuckDB, allows you to build a powerful, production-grade data lakehouse locally. The session will culminate in a live demo showing how to perform exploratory analysis on raw data files, formalize them into a lakehouse, and seamlessly integrate with popular transformation tools like dbt and SQLMesh to build robust, version-controlled data pipelines.
