FastBCP 1.6.7 exports 150M SQL Server rows to Parquet faster than DuckDB 2.0

A benchmark comparing methods for exporting 150 million rows from SQL Server 2025 to Zstandard-compressed Parquet files demonstrates that reading striped SQL Server backup files directly with FastBCP is dramatically faster than using DuckDB or querying a live database. The parallel backup export completed in 10.1 seconds, achieving up to 18 times the speed of DuckDB while placing zero CPU load on the running SQL Server instance. On live databases, using the RangeId parallel method substantially outperformed physical row-location splitting. Open article →