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arXiv · 2602.18775

Should I Hide My Duck in the Lake?

Jonas Dann·Gustavo Alonso
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Abstract

Data lakes spend a significant fraction of query execution time on scanning data from remote, disaggregated storage. Decoding alone accounts for 46% of runtime when running TPC-H directly on Parquet files. To address this bottleneck, we propose a vision for a data processing SmartNIC for the cloud that sits on the network datapath of compute nodes to offload decoding and pushed-down operators, effectively hiding the cost of parsing raw files. Our experimental estimations with DuckDB suggest that by operating directly on pre-filtered data, as delivered by a SmartNIC, we can significantly increase query processing performance and can still match query throughput of traditional setups with smaller, less expensive CPUs.

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Jonas Dann, Gustavo Alonso. 2026-02-21. Should I Hide My Duck in the Lake?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18775

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