e.g. This is primarily aimed at first- and second-year undergraduates interested in engineering or science, along with high school students and professionals with an interest in programming.DuckDB From Zero teaches you how to embed DuckDB directly into your Rust applications, treating an analytical SQL engine as a library rather than a server. Across four hands-on modules, you'll move from compiling DuckDB into a single binary to writing SQL queries over local CSV, Parquet, and JSON files, streaming Arrow record batches into Polars, and shipping a polished command-line tool with cargo dist.

By the end you will understand when in-memory connections beat on-disk databases, how projection and predicate pushdown make Parquet queries fast on a laptop, how to hand results to Polars zero-copy through the Arrow C Data Interface, and how to package a Rust CLI that bundles DuckDB so users can install nothing and still run analytical queries against gigabytes of data. The course is built around short videos, key-term readings, scenario-driven reflections, and an end-to-end demo project. You will leave with a working understanding of DuckDB-in-Rust patterns, the skills to design an analytical CLI you would actually want to use, and a clear mental model of where DuckDB fits between SQLite, Spark, and the Polars/Arrow ecosystem.