--- title: Bringing the Big Ducks | daily.dev description: MotherDuck's single-node 'Giga' instance keeps pace with distributed data warehouses on the TPC-DS benchmark at scales up to 10 terabytes. At 1 TB (scale... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/bringing-the-big-ducks-px1uksrjv twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Bringing the Big Ducks | daily.dev og:description: MotherDuck's single-node 'Giga' instance keeps pace with distributed data warehouses on the TPC-DS benchmark at scales up to 10 terabytes. At 1 TB (scale... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/bringing-the-big-ducks-px1uksrjv og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/px1ukSrjV.png og:image:alt: Bringing the Big Ducks og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Bringing the Big Ducks **[MotherDuck](https://daily.dev/sources/motherduck)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary MotherDuck's single-node 'Giga' instance keeps pace with distributed data warehouses on the TPC-DS benchmark at scales up to 10 terabytes. At 1 TB (scale factor 1,000), MotherDuck scored a 690 millisecond geomean, versus Redshift's 4.2 seconds, Snowflake 2XL's 4.9 seconds, and BigQuery's 6.1 seconds from a 2022 Fivetran benchmark. At 10 TB (scale factor 10,000), MotherDuck hit 5.6 seconds versus Redshift's 8 seconds in a 2022 Oracle benchmark. The Giga instance uses the better part of an instance with 192 cores and 1.5 TB of RAM, and the tests used DuckDB 1.5.6, not the newly released DuckDB 2.0, which CEO Jordan Tigani says brings further performance gains for larger instances. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How does MotherDuck's single-node architecture perform against Snowflake and Redshift on the TPC-DS benchmark at 1 terabyte scale? MotherDuck's Giga instance scored a geometric mean of 690 milliseconds on the TPC-DS benchmark at scale factor 1,000 (about 1 terabyte), compared to Redshift at 4.2 seconds, Snowflake 2XL at 4.9 seconds, Databricks 2X at 6 seconds, and BigQuery at 6.1 seconds, based on a 2022 Fivetran benchmark comparison. _Comparing warehouse architectures before committing is easier when benchmarks like this surface on daily.dev._ ### Can a single-node database architecture like DuckDB handle 10 terabyte scale data warehouse workloads? Yes, MotherDuck's single-node Giga instance (192 cores, 1.5 TB RAM) completed the TPC-DS benchmark at scale factor 10,000, roughly 10 terabytes on disk and 168 terabytes scanned, with a geometric mean of 5.6 seconds, competitive with Redshift's 8 seconds in a 2022 Oracle benchmark against Snowflake, BigQuery, and Azure Synapse. _Developers weighing single-node versus distributed architectures track real benchmark data like this on daily.dev._ ### What performance improvements does DuckDB 2.0 bring compared to DuckDB 1.5.6? DuckDB 2.0 includes significant performance improvements, particularly for larger instances, though specific benchmark numbers for version 2.0 were not yet available since MotherDuck was still running DuckDB 1.5.6 and waiting for the first 2.0 patch release before upgrading. Over the prior year, DuckDB's benchmark performance had largely doubled. _Teams planning a DuckDB upgrade can follow version-specific performance changes on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Stop Paying the Complexity Tax](https://daily.dev/posts/stop-paying-the-complexity-tax-nu5xcvtmi) · MotherDuck · 83 upvotes · 0 comments - [650GB of Data \(Delta Lake on S3\). Polars vs DuckDB vs Daft vs Spark.](https://daily.dev/posts/650gb-of-data-delta-lake-on-s3-polars-vs-duckdb-vs-daft-vs-spark--bbkmmear9) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The DuckDB MySQL engine at 500 GB](https://daily.dev/posts/the-duckdb-mysql-engine-at-500-gb-baqjll9pk) · Planet MySQL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Benchmarking DuckDB v2.0-dev on NVIDIA Vera](https://daily.dev/posts/benchmarking-duckdb-v2-0-dev-on-nvidia-vera-twi4hchel) · DuckDB · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#snowflake](https://daily.dev/tags/snowflake), [#data-warehouse](https://daily.dev/tags/data-warehouse), [#duckdb](https://daily.dev/tags/duckdb) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/bringing-the-big-ducks-px1uksrjv) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Bringing the Big Ducks","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/bringing-the-big-ducks-px1uksrjv","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/bringing-the-big-ducks-px1uksrjv"},"datePublished":"2026-10-28T16:03:23.388Z","dateModified":"2026-10-28T16:22:46.505Z","description":"MotherDuck's single-node 'Giga' instance keeps pace with distributed data warehouses on the TPC-DS benchmark at scales up to 10 terabytes. 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