arc

Arc combines DuckDB's SQL engine with Parquet storage and Apache Arrow's in-memory format for processing large tabular files. The pitch: 18M+ records per second on analytical queries, deployed as a single Go binary.

It's a lightweight analytical database you can spin up without a cluster. Load your data in Parquet format, query it with standard SQL, and get results faster than most traditional databases can scan the data. It's designed for analytics workloads where you're aggregating, filtering, and joining large tables, not for transactional OLTP with lots of small writes.

The project is early stage (, nascent tier). The enterprise page exists at basekick.net but specific pricing isn't public yet.

The catch: this is very new. DuckDB itself is more mature and does much of what Arc does. The AGPL license means any network service using Arc must open-source its code, or you need an enterprise license. The documentation is thin, the community is small, and production battle-testing is limited. If you need a fast analytical query engine today, DuckDB is the safer bet. Arc is one to watch if the DuckDB + Parquet + Arrow integration proves to be more than the sum of its parts.