I had similiar issue, but for aggreagations. Use case was to "compress" large datasets into smaller aggregations for insertion into a costly db. At first we used duckdb but memory became an issue there and we also bumped into a couple of issues with how duckdb handles arrays. We then moved this workload to clickhouse local, which was faster and had more fine tuning options to our liking. in this case was limiting ram usage with i.e. max_bytes_before_external_group_by