Maybe SQLite Is Still Better Than DuckDB for My Workloads

The Conventional Wisdom Open any data-engineering thread in 2026 and you'll see the same chorus: "DuckDB is the SQLite of analytics, just use it." Migration guides flood the internet. People are converting their SQLite warehouses to DuckDB and posting benchmarks where aggregations run 100x faster. Here's what often gets glossed over: DuckDB is not a strict upgrade over SQLite. It's a different tool with a different design center. And for a surprising number of real-world projects, defaulting to