DuckDB is my new Excel ·
I'll admit it: as a data engineer I still use Excel. But DuckDB has become my secret weapon for ad-hoc data exploration. No more struggling with CSV imports, no more manual column matching across files, no more giving up on JSON. This guide shows you how to query remote CSVs, handle schema drift across multiple files, unnest nested data, and flatten JSON APIs—all with SQL you can remember if you can remember Excel formulas.