# The Journey to Zero-Copy: How chDB Became the Fastest SQL Engine on Pandas DataFrame

DevFeed: [The Journey to Zero-Copy: How chDB Became the Fastest SQL Engine on Pandas DataFrame](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-journey-to-zero-copy-how-chdb-became-the-fastest-sql-engine-on-pandas-dataframe-5034.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://clickhouse.com/blog/chdb-journey-to-zero-copy>)

Author: Xiaozhe Yu Auxten Wang

Published: 2026-01-09T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [ClickHouse Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/clickhouse-blog.md>)

Topics: [clickhouse](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/clickhouse.md>), [pandas](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pandas.md>), [SQL](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sql.md>), [Data Science](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data-science.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>)

Tags: [clickhouse](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/clickhouse.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [data-science](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-science.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [sql](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sql.md>), [streaming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/streaming.md>)

## AI overview

This article describes the development of chDB, a Python library that packages ClickHouse for running SQL directly on Pandas DataFrames. It explains how the project removed serialization and deserialization overhead to provide native DataFrame input and output, zero configuration, ClickHouse's multithreaded performance, and more memory-efficient streaming. The article reports that chDB v2 became 87 times faster than version 1.0.

## Source excerpt

From 30 seconds to 0.5 seconds -- the story of how we made ClickHouse fly on in-memory data