DuckDB out of the box may not be great. But you have DuckLake, Quack, and even DeepSeek made their own distributed DB based on DuckDB: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/smallpond

I don't think DuckDB itself can coordinate work across multiple nodes. But you could put it behind an HTTP layer and scale horizontally based on resource utilization?

Athena + Clickhouse has been an absolute game changer for us. Perfect combo for OLAP + deeper filtering that we can’t necessarily pre-index for.