What I love about duckdb:

-- Support for .parquet, .json, .csv (note: Spotify listening history comes in a multiple .json files, something fun to play with).

-- Support for glob reading, like: select * from 'tsa20*.csv' - so you can read hundreds of files (any type of file!) as if they were one file.

-- if the files don't have the same schema, union_by_name is amazing.

-- The .csv parser is amazing. Auto assigns types well.

-- It's small! The Web Assembly version is 2mb! The CLI is 16mb.

-- Because it is small you can add duckdb directly to your product, like Malloy has done: https://www.malloydata.dev/ - I think of Malloy as a technical persons alternative to PowerBI and Tableau, but it uses a semantic model that helps AI write amazing queries on your data. Edit: Malloy makes SQL 10x easier to write because of its semantic nature. Malloy transpiles to SQL, like Typescript transpiles to Javascript.