Comparing SQLite, DuckDB and Arrow with UN trade data
The relevant results from the linked article:    ##    format          median_time  mem_alloc
    ## 1  R (RDS)               1.34m     4.08GB
    ## 2  SQL (SQLite)          5.48s     6.17MB
    ## 3  SQL (DuckDB)          1.76s   104.66KB
    ## 4  Arrow (Parquet)       1.36s   453.89MB

I'd bet that doing the same with Pandas would require time and space similar to RDS (1). I really hope DuckDB makes it in the Python world, everything I read about it seems very promising. Using it myself for toy projects was pleasant, too.