https://chinmaydeval.com/tags/fema/ Recent content in FEMA on Chinmay Deval Hugo -- gohugo.io en Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://chinmaydeval.com/blog/15x-faster-geospatial-pipelines-why-i-swapped-pandas-for-duckdb/ Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://chinmaydeval.com/blog/15x-faster-geospatial-pipelines-why-i-swapped-pandas-for-duckdb/ ⚡ TL;DR The Task: Map 73M+ FEMA NFIP policy records and 3M+ claims (since 1978) to U.S. county boundaries The Bottleneck: A Pandas/GeoPandas pipeline that took 10.5s and consumed significant memory The Fix: A single DuckDB SQL query using the spatial extension The Result: 0.69 seconds (15.2x faster) This post walks through how I optimized a real-world FEMA geospatial pipeline using DuckDB and why it significantly outperforms Pandas for large-scale spatial joins.