Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster

DuckDB 2.0, releasing this fall, delivers significant performance improvements, particularly through async I/O that enables simultaneous network downloads and CPU processing—cutting S3 query times by more than half (from 18.8s to 7.7s in the author's test) by maintaining dozens of row groups in flight rather than waiting for each one sequentially. The performance gains require understanding how data is shaped and sometimes adjusting data modeling, with the most impactful improvements coming from async I/O and other features detailed in the release's commit logs.