DuckDB on Fargate beats Spark on EMR for S3 JSON reads
A benchmark pits DuckDB on ECS Fargate against Spark on EMR Serverless over 1,000 JSON files from S3, with some files spiking past 20MB to force real-world skew. DuckDB finished about 3.4x faster and at lower cost. A useful datapoint for teams weighing lightweight engines over managed Spark clusters.