Interesting and well-written article. Thanks to the author for writing it. Replacing Spark with these single-machine tools seems to be on the hype, and Spark is not en vogue anymore.
The author ran Spark in Fabric, which has V-Order write enabled by default. DuckDB and Polars don't have this, as it's an MS proprietary algorithm. V-Order adds about 15% overhead to write, so it does change the result a bit.
The data sizes were bit on a large size, at least for the data amounts I see daily. There definitely are tables in the 10GB, 100GB, and even in 1TB size range, but most tables traveling through data pipelines are much smaller.
The author ran Spark in Fabric, which has V-Order write enabled by default. DuckDB and Polars don't have this, as it's an MS proprietary algorithm. V-Order adds about 15% overhead to write, so it does change the result a bit.
The data sizes were bit on a large size, at least for the data amounts I see daily. There definitely are tables in the 10GB, 100GB, and even in 1TB size range, but most tables traveling through data pipelines are much smaller.