Use DuckDB in ensembldb to query Ensembl's genome annotations
I have been using ensembldb to query genome annotations locally, which stores the Ensembl annotations in a offline SQLite database. By replacing the database engine with DuckDB, genome-wide queries are faster with small impact on gene specific queries (depending on the usage). DuckDB database’s file size is also smaller, and it can be even smaller by offloading the tables to external Parquet files.