By default, it tries to take 80% of your memory. I've found that you need to set it to something much smaller in ~/.duckdbrc `set max_memory='1GB';`

it's not the focus or very performant but you can have it spill to disk if you run out of memory. I wouldn't suggest building a solution based on this approach though; the sweet-spot is memory-constrained.

Really? How large? I’ve only managed to crash it with hundreds/thousands of files so far, but haven’t so many huge files to deal with.