PostgreSQL 17 vs DuckDB 1.2: What Actually Scales in 2026 By 2026, the database landscape has matured around two distinct pillars: battle-tested relational workhorses and lightweight, purpose-built analytics engines. PostgreSQL 17, the latest long-term support release of the world’s most popular open-source RDBMS, and DuckDB 1.2, the stable, production-ready iteration of the in-process OLAP darling, represent these two camps. But when teams talk about "scalability" in 2026, they’re rarely referring to the same thing. This article breaks down what actually scales for each system, and when to pick one over the other. Quick Background: The Contenders PostgreSQL 17, released in late 2024, solidified its position as the go-to for transactional workloads. Key 2026-relevant features include native horizontal sharding improvements, enhanced parallel query execution, 50% faster JSONB processing, and built-in support for serverless read replicas.…