DuckDB

Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2020–2026), in 14 threads.

People raised many different problems with DuckDB, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 17 complaints

UI differs from regular mail clients, so non-technical users would struggle2026-05-01
Out-of-memory errors on large data require manual tuning the user can't figure out2026-04-22
Hard to get it to pick the right thread count and memory amount, causing crashes2025-10-31
No one-click way to add a WHERE filter from a result value2025-10-19
Edits must be made by writing queries rather than directly2025-08-26
Author couldn't figure out how to use the spatial features2025-05-03
Preview fails to start with a cryptic extension download 403 error2025-04-24
Can't find docs or source for the UI; extension docs point to a different product2025-03-12
Installing the UI differs from other extensions, so it is hard to understand2025-03-12
Installing via conda, pip, or building from source all fail2025-03-12
API is inconsistent and requires too much typing and memorization2024-09-09
Delete, Home and paste keys don't work, with blinking and input lag on each keypress2024-06-26
Hard to find parameter details for parquet_scan functions2023-03-03
Querying deeply nested JSON needs multiple layers of unnest, which is painful2023-03-03
Up arrow cycles through single lines of a multi-line query instead of recalling the whole query2022-11-03
Example field names sound like tables or rows, which makes examples confusing2022-05-12
Auto-detected OS shows the wrong CLI download, a macOS binary on Linux2020-09-20