ML & Data Science

pandas vs Polars vs DuckDB on 3.5 Million Taxi Rides. DuckDB Won Every Query, and the Timings Were the Least Interesting Part.

I ran pandas, Polars, and DuckDB through the same 3.5M-row NYC taxi CSV on a 7GB box. DuckDB won every query and used half the memory of pandas, but the most useful finding was a CSV parsing gotcha, not a timing.

Ibrahim Denis Fofanah·Sep 29, 2026·6 min