duckdb

duckdb is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 85 tokens per session (2,702 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

An embedded analytical database for running SQL directly in an application, script, or notebook without a separate server. DuckDB can query files such as Parquet, CSV, JSON, and Arrow in place; OLAP means analysis of large sets of data rather than routine app transactions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to aggregate, join, and analyze file-based data, replace slow pandas groupby operations on multi-gigabyte data, and run analytics over lakehouse or object-storage files.
Why use it?
It removes the need to load local or remote data into another database for many analysis tasks. It is suited to one-process analysis, not a shared multi-user service or transactional application database.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/duckdb
Any agent
npx skills add ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill duckdb
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for duckdb

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/duckdb.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/duckdb)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/duckdb"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/duckdb.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,702 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00085 $0.02702
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.01351
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00540
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00270

Measured 3d ago against content hash 4c0ab72c7f66, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

duckdb scanned grade C with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/verify.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Downloads and executes remote codehighSupply chain

curl | sh runs whatever the server returns today, which is not necessarily what it returned when this was reviewed.

curl https://install.duckdb.org | sh # or: brew install duckdb

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl https://install.duckdb.org | sh # or: brew install duckdb
skills/duckdb/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

DuckDB — embedded columnar OLAP, no server

DuckDB is an in-process analytical (OLAP) database: it links into your process like SQLite, but stores data column-by-column and vectorizes execution for aggregates, joins, and window functions. There is no server, no port, no daemon — you pip install duckdb (or drop one CLI binary) and query. Its killer move is reading Parquet/CSV/JSON/Arrow in place, without a load step, so a folder of files becomes a table.

The fact that drives every routing decision below: DuckDB is one writer, many readers, single process. It is brilliant for analysis on one machine and wrong for multi-user serving or transactional app writes.

Latest stable is v1.5.3 (released 2026-05-20). Pin the LTS line (v1.4.x; v1.4.4 LTS shipped 2026-01-26) for anything long-lived — LTS gets ~1 year of patches and a stable storage format. Use 1.5.x for greenfield exploration.

Is DuckDB the tool? (decide first)

Your workload Reach for
Analytics over local/remote files, one process, one writer duckdb (this skill)
Many concurrent users, production query API, dashboards-as-a-service, petabyte scale clickhouse-analytics
App transactional CRUD: users, orders, many small writes, FKs, connection pool postgresdb
Embedded single-file transactional store / edge / sync sqlite-turso
Pure SQL syntax question, engine-agnostic (window fns, CTEs) sql
Similarity / embedding search as the core workflow vector-db

The two you will confuse most: DuckDB vs ClickHouse is embedded-single-node vs server-distributed — under ~10GB on one box DuckDB usually wins; pick ClickHouse when many people query concurrently. DuckDB vs SQLite is same niche, opposite workload — both embedded single-file, but SQLite is row-store OLTP and DuckDB is column-store OLAP. Don't run your app's writes through DuckDB.

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 203 lines · 85 tokens per session scan C 4c0ab72c7f66

Subscribe to this mod's changes

duckdb is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (65 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 2,702 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 2 findings (downloads and executes remote code, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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