Why This Caught My Eye

DuckDB’s file-native design is a first-class feature, not a limitation. File-native is good design. This article makes that clearer by pulling back the curtain on Postgres – a great database, but ultimately a complex program that stores data in a filesystem.

Note: the article contains a long quote used here for context. Trim to under 15 words before publishing.

At its core, postgres is simply a program that turns SQL queries into filesystem operations. A CREATE TABLE becomes a mkdir. An UPDATE eventually becomes: open a file, write to it, close it. It’s a complex and powerful system—but fundamentally, it’s just an executable that manipulates files.