Re:Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol
by amadio on Thursday May 14, 2026 @04:05AM
(#48132420)
Very interesting. I've been meaning to take a deeper look at DuckDB for a while to compare it with ROOT. Since CERN is cited for the origins of HTTP, I thought I'd leave here a comment for another project out of the high energy physics world in this domain, though: XRootD:
If you need to scale data access with whatever tool, it might be worth a look. XRootD is most often used with ROOT (https://root.cern), but can be used more generically as well (e.g. LSST uses XRootD to create a clustered SQL solution called QServ, so it could be used also in a similar way to plug remote data access to DuckDB). It powers CERN's EOS distributed filesystem, for example, where CERN stores all physics data from the major experiments at the LHC.
*disclaimer, I'm the release manager for XRootD and work in the storage and data management group at CERN.
- https://github.com/xrootd/xrootd
- https://youtu.be/D4Mn_5MdnDc
If you need to scale data access with whatever tool, it might be worth a look. XRootD is most often used with ROOT (https://root.cern), but can be used more generically as well (e.g. LSST uses XRootD to create a clustered SQL solution called QServ, so it could be used also in a similar way to plug remote data access to DuckDB). It powers CERN's EOS distributed filesystem, for example, where CERN stores all physics data from the major experiments at the LHC.
*disclaimer, I'm the release manager for XRootD and work in the storage and data management group at CERN.