SHOULD YOU DITCH SPARK FOR DUCKDB OR POLARS?

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

A performance benchmark compared Spark, DuckDB, and Polars for typical lakehouse data engineering tasks. This author found that Spark's performance scaled better with increased compute resources than DuckDB and Polars, which experienced out-of-memory errors at lower core counts. While DuckDB and Polars were great at ad-hoc queries, Spark was very competitive for larger ELT processes.