Trying DuckDB for Magento Analytics: An Experiment with One Million Orders
A hands-on experiment tests the MariaDB DuckDB storage engine as an analytical layer for a Magento shop with one million orders and two million order items. Keeping Magento's operational tables on InnoDB while running the full Orders Report against DuckDB snapshots dropped combined query time from 18.464s (InnoDB only) to 8.267s (orders on DuckDB, items still InnoDB) to 0.292s (both tables on DuckDB) — a 63.2x speedup. The author notes the snapshot load itself took 34.5 seconds, discusses why a warmed COUNT(*) comparison is misleading, sketches a snapshot/ETL architecture separating transactional and analytical storage, and lists limitations plus a roadmap including testing synchronous dual writes across InnoDB and DuckDB in one transaction.