8 ms·

AWS Acquires DuckLabs

1102 points by onderkalaci 1mo ago

tosh 1mo ago
did not expect that I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright
- data-ottawa 1mo ago
  Also did not expect this. I did expect MotherDuck to acquire them at some point (in fact, I kinda thought they already did!)
add-sub-mul-div 1mo ago
We just can't have nice things, can we?
- grim_io 1mo ago
  Buying nice things should not be underestimated :)
- systems 1mo ago
  its open source, we can fork .. (i know for such a project it will require a very special group of "we", but in theory .. it can happen)
  - rustyconover 1mo ago
    If you need a fork, I've already done most of the hard work for all of you. https://query.farm/haybarn/ https://query.farm/haybarn/ Or https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn I've been releasing the versions all the way since 1.5.3 and all community extensions.
    - d0100 1mo ago
      > a self-contained, signed extension ecosystem What does this mean? Can I easily sign my own private extensions with my own key? We are currently allowing unsigned extensions, loading them, then locking the duckdb config to prevent loading unsigned/untrusted extensions
      - rustyconover 1mo ago
        In 2.0 you can sign extensions with your own key and have your own extension repo. Thats the plan at least. In 1.5 - Haybarn has its own signing key, but its much faster to get extensions released and deployed.
- geodel 1mo ago
  Just like press freedom is for those who own press, nice things are for those who can buy nice things.
pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
- echelon 1mo ago
  If there's no price tag mentioned, it's likely not generational wealth.
  - fidotron 1mo ago
    Also European so almost certainly underpriced themselves.
  - fourseventy 1mo ago
    There is no way the price tag is less than tens of millions right?
  - willseth 1mo ago
    At Google's size, they're not required to disclose acquisition prices well into the hundreds of millions
    - compiler-guy 1mo ago
      They were acquired by AWS, not Google. But the point still stands.
- tyre 1mo ago
  Very much doubt it’s generational wealth. I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare. My guess is that Amazon wants official hosted versions and doesn’t want to go through something like the Redis fiasco with licensing. In that case, they ended up having to support their own development anyway (with Valkey), so they might as well just buy the team. DuckDB team probably gets a nice package and pay bump, but it’s really unlikely they’re getting hundreds of millions from this.
ferguess_k 1mo ago
Wow congratulations for the original authors, but I hope it doesn't impact the users. I can imagine that it is very useful for AWS because they don't exactly have something similar. I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.
aleda145 1mo ago
[dead]
newtwentysix 1mo ago
super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.
- grim_io 1mo ago
  Complete control over what gets merged and worked on by the core team.
  - orian 1mo ago
    it was already like that, and merging 3rd party changes to the core was troublesome, so maybe aws just bought them cause of this reason :D
- eventualcomp 1mo ago
  Devs gotta eat. Yeah the code is out there but the code is a result of a lot of thinking, prioritization, research into what is needed from the actual product. So now AWS owns that mindshare and talent and will (probably heavily) influence its decisions. I just hope DuckDB doesn't stray from its goal of being the SQLite (e.g. embedded) OLAP.
  - pjmlp 1mo ago
    When will folks finally learn that if they like having a salary, devs that produce tools actually would like to have one as well?
    - geodel 1mo ago
      Never. When it comes to me I am just a poor hustler, surviving a s/w job to make ends meet. When it comes to open source I am gonna hold those guys to highest standard, code, github behavior, tweets, everything must live up to best human ideals. So give your tools, your life, free bug fixing, priority attention to me because I am getting my paid job done. Why they need money anyway, they can leave on reputation of OSS contributors. Also not to forget I donated 5 dollars last year so now give me full certified audit of your finances of last 5 years.
fidotron 1mo ago
Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?
- skeeter2020 1mo ago
  That seems unlikely because AWS needs to build proprietary features within their services to lock in paying (enterprise) users. The problem now is that labs will inevitably focus on this work, which I view as opposed to local, in-process when your paycheque comes from selling hosted services.
- bornfreddy 1mo ago
  And forced AWS to acquire them instead? Nice trick.
hobofan 1mo ago
I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes. Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.
- ferguess_k 1mo ago
  Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
  - felixgallo 1mo ago
    https://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highly-available-key-value-store https://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highl...
    - sargun 1mo ago
      This is massively different from DynamoDB.
      - ihsw 1mo ago
        [dead]
    - ferguess_k 1mo ago
      It is their previous one. I did read another paper about DynamoDB, but still there is not much details. For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
    - senderista 1mo ago
      Nothing to do with DynamoDB except the name.
yipinwong 1mo ago
Congrats to the DuckDB team. I've been eyeballing DuckDB and LanceDB as part of AI agent memories. This gives me a vibe that AWS will use DuckDB somehow in their ai agents sometime in the near future after seeing the potential.
- m00dy 1mo ago
  like vector search ?
  - yipinwong 1mo ago
    Yes. AWS has OpenSearch for cloud-first vector searches (disregarding cloud-hosted postgres with extensions etc). It's ridiculously expensive and not as fast. DuckDB to the rescue. Also embed the crap outta DuckDB locally in local agents running on VPS, etc
    - m00dy 1mo ago
      May I ask how DuckDB is making vector search better than others ?
m1keil 1mo ago
Waiting for QuackDB the OSS spin off any second now
- rustyconover 1mo ago
  I've already created Haybarn which is Query.Farm's distribution of DuckDB: learn about it here: https://query.farm/haybarn/ https://query.farm/haybarn/
  - anentropic 1mo ago
    If my extension shows as "build failed" on https://query.farm/haybarn/status/v1.5.5/ https://query.farm/haybarn/status/v1.5.5/ how do I go about fixing it? Presumably the issue is Haybarn-specific?
    - rustyconover 1mo ago
      You can get in touch with me, or open an issue or PR as to why. The CI extension build runs are still public on GitHub, but may have expired, if you bump your git sha ref it will rerun.
      - anentropic 1mo ago
        Took a bit of searching around to find the repo: https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-extensions https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-exte... Looks like this is the failed build https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-extensions/actions/runs/31315931996 https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-exte... but logs have expired
        rustyconover 1mo ago
        I'll kick it off again for you.
        1mo ago
schmuhblaster 1mo ago
I've been super impressed by DuckDB ever since first trying it out about 3 three years ago. Congrats to the founders!
meerita 1mo ago
I am glad for them. Does anyone know the amount of the operation?
Bluestein 1mo ago
Extend, embrace, quack.-
karakanb 1mo ago
I wasn't expecting this, and I am pleasantly surprised. I think AWS has been a bad player in the data space and very much behind all the other warehouse providers for many years now. This could lead into interesting integrations of DuckDB on top of all the data that lives in S3 and provide a leaner, faster and a more modern alternative to Athena.
- nicornk 1mo ago
  This would be my bet and hope as well.
- pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
  Athena already has Trino and Spark engines, it could totally have DuckDB one too.
- smithclay 1mo ago
  Feel like AWS got a lot of the concepts right with S3 Tables* ("serverless" Iceberg catalog on top of S3) ... would love, love to see a version of S3 Tables that lets you choose between Ducklake or Iceberg as the catalog. * Cloudflare also seems to have gotten the same idea right with R2 Data Catalog
tormeh 1mo ago
Seems like a good time to recommend Apache Datafusion. It's designed to be a library, but works pretty well standalone as well. There's a CLI version, but also Python and Java bindings, as well as a Rust library, of course. From my own experience I can say it integrates far better into your Rust app than DuckDB does. Well over 100 monthly contributors, too.
- colinmarc 1mo ago
  Came here to post the same thing. DataFusion is fantastic.
- tobilg 1mo ago
  You can even use DuckLake with Datafusion: https://github.com/tobilg/datafusion-ducklake-provider https://github.com/tobilg/datafusion-ducklake-provider
  - cbility 1mo ago
    https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake is more established, and linked to directly from the ducklake docs
- asa400 1mo ago
  Is Datafusion related to Polars at all? I ask because you mentioned Rust integration.
  - hocuspocus 1mo ago
    No, it's a competing ecosystem, even though both are built on Apache Arrow, and their dataframe APIs might look similar on the surface. DataFusion is being used as a building block for a growing number of databases and data processing engines in Rust, as it offers the necessary primitives.
    - asa400 1mo ago
puszczyk 1mo ago
What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?
- tiffanyh 1mo ago
  My understanding is that MotherDuck provides hosting for DuckDB. And DuckLabs is the engineering behind DuckDB. If I'm correct, this seems like a signal that AWS is coming after the segment of customers wanting to host DuckDB (MotherDucks customers). Correct me if I'm wrong though, please.
  - pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
    You're right - MotherDuck just got Jeffed.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- batdata 1mo ago
  Hey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/ https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/
  - chotmat 1mo ago
    Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”
- skeeter2020 1mo ago
  TL;DR AWS will either acquire MD next/soon, or (more likely) keep them around for the optics that they are totally not going to starve the community of anything other than DuckDB as a hosted AWS service. From the MD "about page": The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.” ... Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckLabs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering.
datadrivenangel 1mo ago
Title is "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"
- ray_v 1mo ago
  This gave me a shot of panic when I read the headline - thanks for correcting the record.
cmiles8 1mo ago
Congrats to the founders but honestly feel bad for the team. Hearing so many not good things coming from inside AWS these days. Place sounds like a total mess. Seems like a constant stream of top talent fleeing on my LinkedIn this past year. I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate it with all the other craziness going on.
- wpietri 1mo ago
  I started using DuckDB last year and I loved it. Small, focused, crackling with competence, no bullshit. I think what I liked about it had a lot to do with it being made by a small group of technical people who weren't interested in "maximizing share holder value" (that is, maximizing executive promotions and bonuses). Maybe this will be the rare case where founders survive corporate shenanigans and keep on doing their thing. But I'm bummed, as I've heard that optimism many more times than I've seen it happen.
- rklaehn 1mo ago
  They built something amazing and now have a nice exit. The code remains open under a non profit foundation. I don't think it is that bad. If working conditions are too bad people will just quit and work for the foundation.
  - shimman 1mo ago
    You make it sound like every worker agreed with this. Is this actually true or is it more about the founders exploiting their workers by selling out to one of the most devious anti-worker tech corporations? Is profit sharing, like what you're implying, actually happening? If so, in what quantity?
  - eikenberry 1mo ago
    An exit can be a nice payout, but only retirement level payouts for a very few. Most will need to find a new job and the market is pretty shit right now and I doubt the foundation has the funds to hire the entire team back.
  - gcarvalho 1mo ago
daviewales 1mo ago
The title is misleading. AWS acquired DuckLabs, NOT DuckDB. The DuckDB source code is still owned by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation. Quote from the article: "As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation... When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so." - Peter Boncz
- aratob 1mo ago
  You are right. AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of the related IP [1]. What they did acquire is DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based services and development company behind the technology which is owned by and employs the creators and major contributors. And MotherDuck is a US-based venture-funded commercial company, whose cloud-based data platform is centered around DuckDB but has been significantly expanded recently, including Python pipelines, an agentic context layer, and a visualisation layer. [1]: https://duckdb.foundation/ https://duckdb.foundation/ [2] https://ducklabs.com/ https://ducklabs.com/ [3] https://motherduck.com/ https://motherduck.com/
  - stingraycharles 1mo ago
    Interesting to see how they will update their About page. Currently it says “Today, DuckLabs remains independent and fully owned by the original creators. We've deliberately chosen not to take venture capital, so we can focus on sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone. “ Future will tell if that ends up being true.
    - Bjartr 1mo ago
      The past tells us not to hold our breath
    - speleding 1mo ago
      They now updated it. That bit is indeed gone.
simlevesque 1mo ago
I said "Oh shit !" out loud in a meeting.
- dmoose 1mo ago
  Ditto, I had a conversation last week about Duck and Kagi being the two things I hoped never got acquired and here we are.
Boxxed 1mo ago
Can we stop consolidating everything under a handful of massive companies?
- oblio 1mo ago
  This will get a lot worse before it will get better. All the hyperscalers will inevitably drift towards total vertical integration. Let's hope they never reach the "owning a private military" stage.
jknoepfler 1mo ago
I guess this will be a good test of the open source model DuckDB has opted into. As I understand it, DuckDB is MIT-licensed and governance is provided by a separate, non-profit DuckDB foundation. This was done explicitly to prevent BSL-ification. I'm very curious to see whether that approach holds the line. I wouldn't bet on it, but one can hope?
flakiness 1mo ago
https://duckdb.org/roadmap https://duckdb.org/roadmap Current Google cache of this page states: > "The DuckDB project is governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation . The Foundation and DuckLabs are not funded by external investors (e.g., venture capital)." But "(Last updated: Aug 2026)" and I was not able to find this text anymore. I wonder if they took vc money after all. I guess not, but still, it seem like to be difficult to live as an independent open source company. Getting a big co as a parent/sponsor is probably the next best thing.
- tyre 1mo ago
  Probably removed because DuckLabs is owned by Amazon now so it’s kind of confusing. Maybe Amazon said, “just take it down, our lawyers will approve some language.”
hckshr 1mo ago
DuckLabs does services and support around DuckDB. "We also worried that scaling DuckLabs into a much larger sales, support, and operations organization would pull our attention away from the technical work and open-source community that made DuckDB successful in the first place." Given AWS's services arm seems like a good play for a team. Congrats!
nprateem 1mo ago
I see a site like https://ducklabs.com/ https://ducklabs.com/ and it's clear I'm waaaay over thinking my website.
igtztorrero 1mo ago
Please No No No why.....
- igtztorrero 1mo ago
  History repeats itself; the same thing will happen as with MySQL—when it was acquired by Oracle, it stagnated.
thataccount 1mo ago
Goodbye DuckDB and hello surprise enterprise DuckDB that has special features that you can't live without that only work with Enterprise DuckDB.
- pbkompasz 1mo ago
  AI, you forgot AI
  - brokencode 1mo ago
    Who needs SQL when you can just ask the DB for the records you want?
    - oblio 1mo ago
      Well, for some cases 80-90% accuracy is good enough. I wouldn't want my info to be in those DBs.
- lolive 1mo ago
  LDAP support :)
- luca4 1mo ago
  We have seen that how many times now? Terraform, docker, elasticsearch, influxdb. Nono, we are still the good guys, believe us. Nothing will change. Yea, thats gonna get forked and rewritten in rust.
log101 1mo ago
1 month later: "Re-writing DuckDB in Rust with Claude Ultra". There is a curios phenomenon, big tech uses great open source projects as a guinea pig for experimenting agent-based development approaches, see Bun, AstroJS.
- dunefox 1mo ago
  Wouldn't be the worst thing, when I last used it, I got some c++ specific errors.
- TheFlyingFish 1mo ago
  I'm aware of the Bun Rust rewrite, but what has Astro done with experimental agent-based work?
akshay_akula 1mo ago
Yeah the foundation is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon's track record with technically interesting projects after a reorg is not great.
baba_vanga 1mo ago
Prediction: this is start of an aquisition spree by AWS.
biosstyle 1mo ago
[flagged]
janpeuker 1mo ago
I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O [1] looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first. 1) https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights
- tuvix 1mo ago
  Agreed that DuckDB as a server feels far from their initial mission, but how does async IO divert from it?
  - janpeuker 1mo ago
    I didn't even necessarily mean diverting from the mission, just that optimising for network storage now reads like a feature maybe prioritised in anticipation of a stronger cloud user base
- skeeter2020 1mo ago
  agree - I was really uneasy with the lede in their v2.0 preview: "DuckDB has been an in-process database since day one. But people have asked us – very persistently – for a client/server mode, and we have finally caved" This was already satisfied by numerous projects and products, and feels like a "me too" attempt to capture AI-based workflows. DuckDB always felt like "SQLite for Analytic Data" but I fear these changes and now acquiring the org leading technical direction is where they deviate for good. AWS is so unnecessary for what DuckDB can (and should, IMO) be; MongoDB jumps to mind as a cautionary tale.
pantsforbirds 1mo ago
I'm hoping this means we get an rds + s3 implementation of ducklake from AWS: https://ducklake.select/ https://ducklake.select/
jakozaur 1mo ago
AWS rarely acquired startups, though leveraging someone else's tech is a typical pattern. It did license ParAccel and sold it as Redshift. It also runs Athena, which is based on Trino (a Presto fork). Now, with Snowflake and Databricks earning big bucks in the intelligence era, time to gain market share by having DuckLabs under its ownership?
- senderista 1mo ago
  Also repackaged Blazegraph as Neptune (the original project was shut down after acquisition).
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
nightski 1mo ago
Remember when big co used to just donate to open source projects to help them out instead of acquiring/dominating them?
theappsecguy 1mo ago
This is awful news.
Ruca_AI 1mo ago
[dead]
h2aichat 1mo ago
AWS is always hungry. Watch out PostgreSQL
- jbonatakis 1mo ago
  This doesn't even make sense. Postgres is and has been open source since the 90s and AWS has had an existing Postgres offering since approximately always.
  - tpetry 1mo ago
    And there is no single company developing. Its a healthy mix of engineers from many companies. A perfect model to prevent this issue here of being aquihired.
nicornk 1mo ago
I hope AWS doesn’t dilute the DuckDB brand by calling their managed DuckDB offering SageMaker<something>…
apercu 1mo ago
On one hand I am glad that (hopefully) some people were rewarded for their hard work. On the other hand, do we have to live in an oligarchy?
dkga 1mo ago
I am a big fan of the Duck team since before their v1.0 and I am happy for them personally for the big payoff, both in monetary terms but also in terms of scale and longer-term viability of their baby. I am also happy to see the arrangement will keep the core OSS. Let's see what the future holds now!
dzonga 1mo ago
AWS acquiring DuckLabs is massive. nice move. one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.
otabdeveloper4 1mo ago
Wow, that sucks balls.
srameshc 1mo ago
I am happy for the team's success but I am sad and anxious for what may become of the DuckDB. It is my favorite tool. Like other comments mentioned, DuckDB is open source and MIT license so I hope it will survive and evolve further the way it did.
0898 1mo ago
I'm an idiot, and a lot of Hacker News goes over my head, but I still read it. Would anyone mind answering this question? Are databases not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different databases? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- xnx 1mo ago
  DuckDB is really great. It's definitely the best tool for working with any type of tabular laptop-sized analytical data. You can do some of what DuckDB does with SQLite, but DuckDB is much more versatile and performant.
- koolba 1mo ago
  There’s trade offs for performance, access patterns, throughput, latency, concurrency, workloads, rigor, type systems, extensibility… really every characteristic you could imagine. It’s not a solved problem because each iteration of technology doesn’t just fix the mistakes of the past, it’s an evolution to solve the problems of the present.
- luckydata 1mo ago
  This is an enormously wide question but the quickest way to give you an idea would be rephrasing as: "Are cars not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different cars? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?" I think the best way to approach the subject in an easy to grasp way is to ask Gemini or another frontier AI to teach you the basics, they will do a surprisingly good job and they'll be able to react to your questions with INFINITE patience.
- toast0 1mo ago
  It's all about tradeoffs. Same reason there are so many kinds of wheeled transport and so many kinds of bridges. There's no single set of requirements and desired properties that people have for databases. What queries does it accept? How does it persist data? How does it manage replication and partitioning across multiple servers? Are questions with many answers and the right one varies by application.
mohitpaddhariya 1mo ago
Insane!!!!
steveshreeve 1mo ago
Shameless plug for DuckDB Harbor - DuckDB server over HTTP (UDS or TCP/IP). Includes a new harbor based DuckDB CLI called pilot: https://github.com/shreeve/duckdb-harbor https://github.com/shreeve/duckdb-harbor
- cbility 1mo ago
  How is this different from the duckdb httpserver extension? https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserver https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserve...
bijowo1676 1mo ago
Great move for AWS, does it mean AWS wants to build competitor to clickhouse ?
pkilgore 1mo ago
Avoid antitrust scrutiny with this one weird trick.
wqtz 1mo ago
I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.
pid-1 1mo ago
Congrats!
leoh 1mo ago
Please edit the title it’s wrong
willbeddow 1mo ago
This is a real shame. I love DuckDB, and we've adopted/extended it and ducklake very heavily at Krea for our research. I know the projects will remain open, and ostensibly still contributed to in the same direction, but surely AWS thinks of this as another piece of a product suite to compete with Databricks. Nontheless, I think the open embedded query engine approach DuckDB is spearheading is larger than one project, and I remain excited about the broader ecosystem (especially datafusion).
jefecoon 1mo ago
Any indication yet as to whether Quack, DuckLake, real-time materialized views dev will continue full-steam ahead? B/c myself and i know of many others very interested in seeing these efforts completed... :crossed-fingers:
lvl155 1mo ago
Man. DuckDB is one of my favorite tools in the past decade. It basically replaced pandas/Polars for me and I hope aws leaves it alone. Otoh, I am glad those guys got paid.
Fervicus 1mo ago
People using DuckDB, what's your use case? I use sqlite for a lot of my personal projects. What's a good use case for using DuckDB?
- phainopepla2 1mo ago
  DuckDB is for analytics, so OLAP instead of OLTP. If you're using the DB for normal transactions, stick with sqlite
  - Fervicus 1mo ago
    Thanks, I gathered that much. I am curious what kind of stuff people are using it for, especially in their personal projects.
    - domper 1mo ago
      One great use case I've found: You can find monthly archives of every reddit comment on Academic torrents. These are huge NDJSON files compressed to .zst, named like 'RC_2026-01.zst'. The size is ~60GB compressed, 350GB+ uncompressed, per month. Most of the size is taken by the actual comment text. But I was only interested in calculating how many unique commenters subreddits have in a month so I only wanted to extract a few fields from it and discard the rest. If you use traditional tools like pandas or load the data to a database and then query it, you would quickly run out of RAM or storage space, especially when doing it on a basic laptop like I was. But with DuckDB it's just this: ``` SELECT lower(subreddit) AS subreddit, author FROM read_json(['RC_2026-01.zst', 'RC_2026-02.zst']) ``` DuckDB automatically handles decompression on the fly, figures out the schema, manages RAM so you won't OOM and so on. And even on my laptop that query takes like, 2 minutes? Which is super impressive to me.
      - Fervicus 1mo ago
        Oh, that's cool. And that's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. So thanks a lot!
alexwennerberg 1mo ago
I'm glad I stuck with SQLite. Governance is an important part of any open source project. SQLite has kept things narrow and focused, while DuckDB's philosophy is to do more and more, making it a general-purpose data science tool. I am old-fashioned in that I believe in the philosophy that software should "do one thing and do it well"
angulardragon03 1mo ago
Back in 2018, I took Hannes’ database course as part of my CS degree, which was one of the better ones I took. Over the years, I’ve seen DuckDB celebrated here (and other places), and now this. Congrats to both him and the Ducklabs team.
jmartrican 1mo ago
How do you suppose AWS can monetize it?
ganeshsivakumar 1mo ago
What if AWS eventually steer away duckdb team's bandwidth towards their AWS products or influence their work, since they are technically AWS employees.
o_m 1mo ago
What is the go to alternative from DuckDB?
gigatexal 1mo ago
This will be the engine for redshift now. They’ll make it read write and it’ll be magic.
arthurcolle 1mo ago
such a disappointing outcome
georgewfraser 1mo ago
AWS is a great home for DuckLabs. They just want people to use more compute and storage, so they have a degree of technology-neutrality. This is the key to allowing DuckDB to continue to grow in whatever directions are natural, rather than being warped by some kind of walled garden data platform strategy.
- jonnat 1mo ago
  Fair point, but no one is clearly articulating what AWS gets out of this. They don't get the DuckDB IP, that's owned by the foundation. All the work that the team at DuckLabs is putting in growing DuckDB and DuckLake are already in principle converting into compute/storage demand in AWS. So what does AWS actually want and how will it change DuckDB to accomplish it?
  - senderista 1mo ago
    Maybe an OLAP db that scales down for serverless?
saxomoose 1mo ago
What does the financial counterpart of such a deal look like if the IP (main asset) is not part of the deal? Purely acqui-hiring?
- saxomoose 1mo ago
  "DuckLabs is joining AWS as a subsidiary" https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-...
shevy-java 1mo ago
That's horrible news.
otterley 1mo ago
More details on the acquisition here: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-... DuckLabs will be an AWS subsidiary, not subsumed into AWS itself.
adsharma 1mo ago
Surprised that there isn't more discussion of DuckDB source distributions. Why do we need a source distribution for a well regarded MIT licensed project? Because it's not easy to contribute code to DuckDB if you don't work at DuckLabs. The CI used to take 5 hours for a simple bug fix last I looked (may have improved since I flagged it on social media). There are two that I'm aware of: * Haybarn: https://rusty.today/blog/duckdb-extension-distribution-gap/ * Pygmy-Goose: https://github.com/Pygmy-Goose/pygmy-goose Pygmy-Goose is focused on making agentic workflows faster by splitting the repo, making git worktrees cheap and 5 minute cached CI on 3 major platforms.
- adsharma 1mo ago
  Several "Graph on DuckDB" efforts started on DuckDB and ended up reinventing a basic columnar codebase to innovate on because of these reasons. Even though people didn't document why, lack of outside contributor friendly flows is likely one of the reasons. KuzuDB folks worked on something called GRainDB in 2022: https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2022/graindb-a-relational-core-graph-relational-dbms.html https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2022/graindb-a-relational-core-graph... But circa 2023 decided to write their own. Work continues as LadybugDB. One of my long term goals is to find an integration point with DuckDB's table implementation as the "node table". Conversely at some point DuckDB could implement all the join algorithms and LadybugDB's REL table in their code base. For now, any talk of Graph on DuckDB is limited to DuckPGQ and the more recent entrant DuckGQL (both of which don't touch the storage layer which is the main reason why LadybugDB exists).
dtnm 1mo ago
Goobye DuckDB.
sakesun 1mo ago
AWS name is really negative. I trust the person leading DuckDB, nevertheless.
adeptima 1mo ago
If you are into geo spatial, worth to check on the same class project - SedonaDB https://github.com/apache/sedona-db https://github.com/apache/sedona-db "SedonaDB is an open-source single-node analytical database engine with geospatial as a first-class citizen" Apache License 2.0 https://github.com/apache/sedona-db/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/apache/sedona-db/blob/main/LICENSE MIT License https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/functions https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/func...
kevinbaiv 1mo ago
[flagged]
petrev01 1mo ago
This is easily one of the most disappointing pieces of tech news I've read in a long time. RIP indie duck-things.
kimseungyong 1mo ago
Who is better? AWS? Google? MS?
g8oz 1mo ago
I fear this is the end of the rapid pace of innovation that we've seen from DuckDb. "AWS has committed to supporting the continued development of DuckDB and its wider community for the long term." Those are just words man.
opem 1mo ago
Huge moment for the people behind duckdb. I've been using duckdb since the days of its preview releases and I knew they were gonna make it big. So, this one is well deserved. I hope duckdb's governance continues to stay under duckdb foundation.
swoorup 1mo ago
I work at a company heavily invested in AWS. Every now and then AWS developer advocates presents a way to adopt "latest" technology in the most obscure way possible.
SamEdwardes 1mo ago
Recent podcast that covers the acquisition: https://castro.fm/episode/OLVNYw https://castro.fm/episode/OLVNYw

1102 points by onderkalaci 1mo ago

tosh 1mo ago

did not expect that I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright

data-ottawa 1mo ago
Also did not expect this. I did expect MotherDuck to acquire them at some point (in fact, I kinda thought they already did!)

add-sub-mul-div 1mo ago

We just can't have nice things, can we?

grim_io 1mo ago
Buying nice things should not be underestimated :)
systems 1mo ago
its open source, we can fork .. (i know for such a project it will require a very special group of "we", but in theory .. it can happen)
- rustyconover 1mo ago
  If you need a fork, I've already done most of the hard work for all of you. https://query.farm/haybarn/ https://query.farm/haybarn/ Or https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn I've been releasing the versions all the way since 1.5.3 and all community extensions.
  - d0100 1mo ago
    > a self-contained, signed extension ecosystem What does this mean? Can I easily sign my own private extensions with my own key? We are currently allowing unsigned extensions, loading them, then locking the duckdb config to prevent loading unsigned/untrusted extensions
    - rustyconover 1mo ago
      In 2.0 you can sign extensions with your own key and have your own extension repo. Thats the plan at least. In 1.5 - Haybarn has its own signing key, but its much faster to get extensions released and deployed.
geodel 1mo ago
Just like press freedom is for those who own press, nice things are for those who can buy nice things.

pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago

Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.

echelon 1mo ago
If there's no price tag mentioned, it's likely not generational wealth.
- fidotron 1mo ago
  Also European so almost certainly underpriced themselves.
- fourseventy 1mo ago
  There is no way the price tag is less than tens of millions right?
- willseth 1mo ago
  At Google's size, they're not required to disclose acquisition prices well into the hundreds of millions
  - compiler-guy 1mo ago
    They were acquired by AWS, not Google. But the point still stands.
tyre 1mo ago
Very much doubt it’s generational wealth. I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare. My guess is that Amazon wants official hosted versions and doesn’t want to go through something like the Redis fiasco with licensing. In that case, they ended up having to support their own development anyway (with Valkey), so they might as well just buy the team. DuckDB team probably gets a nice package and pay bump, but it’s really unlikely they’re getting hundreds of millions from this.

ferguess_k 1mo ago

Wow congratulations for the original authors, but I hope it doesn't impact the users. I can imagine that it is very useful for AWS because they don't exactly have something similar. I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.

aleda145 1mo ago

[dead]

newtwentysix 1mo ago

super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.

grim_io 1mo ago
Complete control over what gets merged and worked on by the core team.
- orian 1mo ago
  it was already like that, and merging 3rd party changes to the core was troublesome, so maybe aws just bought them cause of this reason :D
eventualcomp 1mo ago
Devs gotta eat. Yeah the code is out there but the code is a result of a lot of thinking, prioritization, research into what is needed from the actual product. So now AWS owns that mindshare and talent and will (probably heavily) influence its decisions. I just hope DuckDB doesn't stray from its goal of being the SQLite (e.g. embedded) OLAP.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  When will folks finally learn that if they like having a salary, devs that produce tools actually would like to have one as well?
  - geodel 1mo ago
    Never. When it comes to me I am just a poor hustler, surviving a s/w job to make ends meet. When it comes to open source I am gonna hold those guys to highest standard, code, github behavior, tweets, everything must live up to best human ideals. So give your tools, your life, free bug fixing, priority attention to me because I am getting my paid job done. Why they need money anyway, they can leave on reputation of OSS contributors. Also not to forget I donated 5 dollars last year so now give me full certified audit of your finances of last 5 years.

fidotron 1mo ago

Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?

skeeter2020 1mo ago
That seems unlikely because AWS needs to build proprietary features within their services to lock in paying (enterprise) users. The problem now is that labs will inevitably focus on this work, which I view as opposed to local, in-process when your paycheque comes from selling hosted services.
bornfreddy 1mo ago
And forced AWS to acquire them instead? Nice trick.

hobofan 1mo ago

I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes. Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.

ferguess_k 1mo ago
Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
- felixgallo 1mo ago
  https://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highly-available-key-value-store https://www.amazon.science/publications/dynamo-amazons-highl...
  - sargun 1mo ago
    This is massively different from DynamoDB.
    - ihsw 1mo ago
      [dead]
  - ferguess_k 1mo ago
    It is their previous one. I did read another paper about DynamoDB, but still there is not much details. For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
  - senderista 1mo ago
    Nothing to do with DynamoDB except the name.

yipinwong 1mo ago

Congrats to the DuckDB team. I've been eyeballing DuckDB and LanceDB as part of AI agent memories. This gives me a vibe that AWS will use DuckDB somehow in their ai agents sometime in the near future after seeing the potential.

m00dy 1mo ago
like vector search ?
- yipinwong 1mo ago
  Yes. AWS has OpenSearch for cloud-first vector searches (disregarding cloud-hosted postgres with extensions etc). It's ridiculously expensive and not as fast. DuckDB to the rescue. Also embed the crap outta DuckDB locally in local agents running on VPS, etc
  - m00dy 1mo ago
    May I ask how DuckDB is making vector search better than others ?

m1keil 1mo ago

Waiting for QuackDB the OSS spin off any second now

rustyconover 1mo ago
I've already created Haybarn which is Query.Farm's distribution of DuckDB: learn about it here: https://query.farm/haybarn/ https://query.farm/haybarn/
- anentropic 1mo ago
  If my extension shows as "build failed" on https://query.farm/haybarn/status/v1.5.5/ https://query.farm/haybarn/status/v1.5.5/ how do I go about fixing it? Presumably the issue is Haybarn-specific?
  - rustyconover 1mo ago
    You can get in touch with me, or open an issue or PR as to why. The CI extension build runs are still public on GitHub, but may have expired, if you bump your git sha ref it will rerun.
    - anentropic 1mo ago
      Took a bit of searching around to find the repo: https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-extensions https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-exte... Looks like this is the failed build https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-extensions/actions/runs/31315931996 https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-exte... but logs have expired
      - rustyconover 1mo ago
        I'll kick it off again for you.
        1mo ago

schmuhblaster 1mo ago

I've been super impressed by DuckDB ever since first trying it out about 3 three years ago. Congrats to the founders!

meerita 1mo ago

I am glad for them. Does anyone know the amount of the operation?

Bluestein 1mo ago

Extend, embrace, quack.-

karakanb 1mo ago

I wasn't expecting this, and I am pleasantly surprised. I think AWS has been a bad player in the data space and very much behind all the other warehouse providers for many years now. This could lead into interesting integrations of DuckDB on top of all the data that lives in S3 and provide a leaner, faster and a more modern alternative to Athena.

nicornk 1mo ago
This would be my bet and hope as well.
pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
Athena already has Trino and Spark engines, it could totally have DuckDB one too.
smithclay 1mo ago
Feel like AWS got a lot of the concepts right with S3 Tables* ("serverless" Iceberg catalog on top of S3) ... would love, love to see a version of S3 Tables that lets you choose between Ducklake or Iceberg as the catalog. * Cloudflare also seems to have gotten the same idea right with R2 Data Catalog

tormeh 1mo ago

Seems like a good time to recommend Apache Datafusion. It's designed to be a library, but works pretty well standalone as well. There's a CLI version, but also Python and Java bindings, as well as a Rust library, of course. From my own experience I can say it integrates far better into your Rust app than DuckDB does. Well over 100 monthly contributors, too.

colinmarc 1mo ago
Came here to post the same thing. DataFusion is fantastic.
tobilg 1mo ago
You can even use DuckLake with Datafusion: https://github.com/tobilg/datafusion-ducklake-provider https://github.com/tobilg/datafusion-ducklake-provider
- cbility 1mo ago
  https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake is more established, and linked to directly from the ducklake docs
asa400 1mo ago
Is Datafusion related to Polars at all? I ask because you mentioned Rust integration.
- hocuspocus 1mo ago
  No, it's a competing ecosystem, even though both are built on Apache Arrow, and their dataframe APIs might look similar on the surface. DataFusion is being used as a building block for a growing number of databases and data processing engines in Rust, as it offers the necessary primitives.
  - asa400 1mo ago

puszczyk 1mo ago

What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?

tiffanyh 1mo ago
My understanding is that MotherDuck provides hosting for DuckDB. And DuckLabs is the engineering behind DuckDB. If I'm correct, this seems like a signal that AWS is coming after the segment of customers wanting to host DuckDB (MotherDucks customers). Correct me if I'm wrong though, please.
- pepperoni_pizza 1mo ago
  You're right - MotherDuck just got Jeffed.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
batdata 1mo ago
Hey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/ https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/
- chotmat 1mo ago
  Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”
skeeter2020 1mo ago
TL;DR AWS will either acquire MD next/soon, or (more likely) keep them around for the optics that they are totally not going to starve the community of anything other than DuckDB as a hosted AWS service. From the MD "about page": The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.” ... Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckLabs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering.

datadrivenangel 1mo ago

Title is "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"

ray_v 1mo ago
This gave me a shot of panic when I read the headline - thanks for correcting the record.

cmiles8 1mo ago

Congrats to the founders but honestly feel bad for the team. Hearing so many not good things coming from inside AWS these days. Place sounds like a total mess. Seems like a constant stream of top talent fleeing on my LinkedIn this past year. I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate it with all the other craziness going on.

wpietri 1mo ago
I started using DuckDB last year and I loved it. Small, focused, crackling with competence, no bullshit. I think what I liked about it had a lot to do with it being made by a small group of technical people who weren't interested in "maximizing share holder value" (that is, maximizing executive promotions and bonuses). Maybe this will be the rare case where founders survive corporate shenanigans and keep on doing their thing. But I'm bummed, as I've heard that optimism many more times than I've seen it happen.
rklaehn 1mo ago
They built something amazing and now have a nice exit. The code remains open under a non profit foundation. I don't think it is that bad. If working conditions are too bad people will just quit and work for the foundation.
- shimman 1mo ago
  You make it sound like every worker agreed with this. Is this actually true or is it more about the founders exploiting their workers by selling out to one of the most devious anti-worker tech corporations? Is profit sharing, like what you're implying, actually happening? If so, in what quantity?
- eikenberry 1mo ago
  An exit can be a nice payout, but only retirement level payouts for a very few. Most will need to find a new job and the market is pretty shit right now and I doubt the foundation has the funds to hire the entire team back.
- gcarvalho 1mo ago

daviewales 1mo ago

The title is misleading. AWS acquired DuckLabs, NOT DuckDB. The DuckDB source code is still owned by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation. Quote from the article: "As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation... When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so." - Peter Boncz

aratob 1mo ago
You are right. AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of the related IP [1]. What they did acquire is DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based services and development company behind the technology which is owned by and employs the creators and major contributors. And MotherDuck is a US-based venture-funded commercial company, whose cloud-based data platform is centered around DuckDB but has been significantly expanded recently, including Python pipelines, an agentic context layer, and a visualisation layer. [1]: https://duckdb.foundation/ https://duckdb.foundation/ [2] https://ducklabs.com/ https://ducklabs.com/ [3] https://motherduck.com/ https://motherduck.com/
- stingraycharles 1mo ago
  Interesting to see how they will update their About page. Currently it says “Today, DuckLabs remains independent and fully owned by the original creators. We've deliberately chosen not to take venture capital, so we can focus on sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone. “ Future will tell if that ends up being true.
  - Bjartr 1mo ago
    The past tells us not to hold our breath
  - speleding 1mo ago
    They now updated it. That bit is indeed gone.

simlevesque 1mo ago

I said "Oh shit !" out loud in a meeting.

dmoose 1mo ago
Ditto, I had a conversation last week about Duck and Kagi being the two things I hoped never got acquired and here we are.

Boxxed 1mo ago

Can we stop consolidating everything under a handful of massive companies?

oblio 1mo ago
This will get a lot worse before it will get better. All the hyperscalers will inevitably drift towards total vertical integration. Let's hope they never reach the "owning a private military" stage.

jknoepfler 1mo ago

I guess this will be a good test of the open source model DuckDB has opted into. As I understand it, DuckDB is MIT-licensed and governance is provided by a separate, non-profit DuckDB foundation. This was done explicitly to prevent BSL-ification. I'm very curious to see whether that approach holds the line. I wouldn't bet on it, but one can hope?

flakiness 1mo ago

https://duckdb.org/roadmap https://duckdb.org/roadmap Current Google cache of this page states: > "The DuckDB project is governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation . The Foundation and DuckLabs are not funded by external investors (e.g., venture capital)." But "(Last updated: Aug 2026)" and I was not able to find this text anymore. I wonder if they took vc money after all. I guess not, but still, it seem like to be difficult to live as an independent open source company. Getting a big co as a parent/sponsor is probably the next best thing.

tyre 1mo ago
Probably removed because DuckLabs is owned by Amazon now so it’s kind of confusing. Maybe Amazon said, “just take it down, our lawyers will approve some language.”

hckshr 1mo ago

DuckLabs does services and support around DuckDB. "We also worried that scaling DuckLabs into a much larger sales, support, and operations organization would pull our attention away from the technical work and open-source community that made DuckDB successful in the first place." Given AWS's services arm seems like a good play for a team. Congrats!

nprateem 1mo ago

I see a site like https://ducklabs.com/ https://ducklabs.com/ and it's clear I'm waaaay over thinking my website.

igtztorrero 1mo ago

Please No No No why.....

igtztorrero 1mo ago
History repeats itself; the same thing will happen as with MySQL—when it was acquired by Oracle, it stagnated.

thataccount 1mo ago

Goodbye DuckDB and hello surprise enterprise DuckDB that has special features that you can't live without that only work with Enterprise DuckDB.

pbkompasz 1mo ago
AI, you forgot AI
- brokencode 1mo ago
  Who needs SQL when you can just ask the DB for the records you want?
  - oblio 1mo ago
    Well, for some cases 80-90% accuracy is good enough. I wouldn't want my info to be in those DBs.
lolive 1mo ago
LDAP support :)
luca4 1mo ago
We have seen that how many times now? Terraform, docker, elasticsearch, influxdb. Nono, we are still the good guys, believe us. Nothing will change. Yea, thats gonna get forked and rewritten in rust.

log101 1mo ago

1 month later: "Re-writing DuckDB in Rust with Claude Ultra". There is a curios phenomenon, big tech uses great open source projects as a guinea pig for experimenting agent-based development approaches, see Bun, AstroJS.

dunefox 1mo ago
Wouldn't be the worst thing, when I last used it, I got some c++ specific errors.
TheFlyingFish 1mo ago
I'm aware of the Bun Rust rewrite, but what has Astro done with experimental agent-based work?

akshay_akula 1mo ago

Yeah the foundation is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon's track record with technically interesting projects after a reorg is not great.

baba_vanga 1mo ago

Prediction: this is start of an aquisition spree by AWS.

biosstyle 1mo ago

[flagged]

janpeuker 1mo ago

I was a real fan from the very beginning, but now DuckDB 2.0 "as a server" and 5. asynchronous I/O [1] looks aimed at something very different from what I thought first. 1) https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights

tuvix 1mo ago
Agreed that DuckDB as a server feels far from their initial mission, but how does async IO divert from it?
- janpeuker 1mo ago
  I didn't even necessarily mean diverting from the mission, just that optimising for network storage now reads like a feature maybe prioritised in anticipation of a stronger cloud user base
skeeter2020 1mo ago
agree - I was really uneasy with the lede in their v2.0 preview: "DuckDB has been an in-process database since day one. But people have asked us – very persistently – for a client/server mode, and we have finally caved" This was already satisfied by numerous projects and products, and feels like a "me too" attempt to capture AI-based workflows. DuckDB always felt like "SQLite for Analytic Data" but I fear these changes and now acquiring the org leading technical direction is where they deviate for good. AWS is so unnecessary for what DuckDB can (and should, IMO) be; MongoDB jumps to mind as a cautionary tale.

pantsforbirds 1mo ago

I'm hoping this means we get an rds + s3 implementation of ducklake from AWS: https://ducklake.select/ https://ducklake.select/

jakozaur 1mo ago

AWS rarely acquired startups, though leveraging someone else's tech is a typical pattern. It did license ParAccel and sold it as Redshift. It also runs Athena, which is based on Trino (a Presto fork). Now, with Snowflake and Databricks earning big bucks in the intelligence era, time to gain market share by having DuckLabs under its ownership?

senderista 1mo ago
Also repackaged Blazegraph as Neptune (the original project was shut down after acquisition).
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

nightski 1mo ago

Remember when big co used to just donate to open source projects to help them out instead of acquiring/dominating them?

theappsecguy 1mo ago

This is awful news.

Ruca_AI 1mo ago

[dead]

h2aichat 1mo ago

AWS is always hungry. Watch out PostgreSQL

jbonatakis 1mo ago
This doesn't even make sense. Postgres is and has been open source since the 90s and AWS has had an existing Postgres offering since approximately always.
- tpetry 1mo ago
  And there is no single company developing. Its a healthy mix of engineers from many companies. A perfect model to prevent this issue here of being aquihired.

nicornk 1mo ago

I hope AWS doesn’t dilute the DuckDB brand by calling their managed DuckDB offering SageMaker<something>…

apercu 1mo ago

On one hand I am glad that (hopefully) some people were rewarded for their hard work. On the other hand, do we have to live in an oligarchy?

dkga 1mo ago

I am a big fan of the Duck team since before their v1.0 and I am happy for them personally for the big payoff, both in monetary terms but also in terms of scale and longer-term viability of their baby. I am also happy to see the arrangement will keep the core OSS. Let's see what the future holds now!

dzonga 1mo ago

AWS acquiring DuckLabs is massive. nice move. one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.

otabdeveloper4 1mo ago

Wow, that sucks balls.

srameshc 1mo ago

I am happy for the team's success but I am sad and anxious for what may become of the DuckDB. It is my favorite tool. Like other comments mentioned, DuckDB is open source and MIT license so I hope it will survive and evolve further the way it did.

0898 1mo ago

I'm an idiot, and a lot of Hacker News goes over my head, but I still read it. Would anyone mind answering this question? Are databases not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different databases? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
xnx 1mo ago
DuckDB is really great. It's definitely the best tool for working with any type of tabular laptop-sized analytical data. You can do some of what DuckDB does with SQLite, but DuckDB is much more versatile and performant.
koolba 1mo ago
There’s trade offs for performance, access patterns, throughput, latency, concurrency, workloads, rigor, type systems, extensibility… really every characteristic you could imagine. It’s not a solved problem because each iteration of technology doesn’t just fix the mistakes of the past, it’s an evolution to solve the problems of the present.
luckydata 1mo ago
This is an enormously wide question but the quickest way to give you an idea would be rephrasing as: "Are cars not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different cars? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?" I think the best way to approach the subject in an easy to grasp way is to ask Gemini or another frontier AI to teach you the basics, they will do a surprisingly good job and they'll be able to react to your questions with INFINITE patience.
toast0 1mo ago
It's all about tradeoffs. Same reason there are so many kinds of wheeled transport and so many kinds of bridges. There's no single set of requirements and desired properties that people have for databases. What queries does it accept? How does it persist data? How does it manage replication and partitioning across multiple servers? Are questions with many answers and the right one varies by application.

mohitpaddhariya 1mo ago

Insane!!!!

steveshreeve 1mo ago

Shameless plug for DuckDB Harbor - DuckDB server over HTTP (UDS or TCP/IP). Includes a new harbor based DuckDB CLI called pilot: https://github.com/shreeve/duckdb-harbor https://github.com/shreeve/duckdb-harbor

cbility 1mo ago
How is this different from the duckdb httpserver extension? https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserver https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserve...

bijowo1676 1mo ago

Great move for AWS, does it mean AWS wants to build competitor to clickhouse ?

pkilgore 1mo ago

Avoid antitrust scrutiny with this one weird trick.

wqtz 1mo ago

I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.

pid-1 1mo ago

Congrats!

leoh 1mo ago

Please edit the title it’s wrong

willbeddow 1mo ago

This is a real shame. I love DuckDB, and we've adopted/extended it and ducklake very heavily at Krea for our research. I know the projects will remain open, and ostensibly still contributed to in the same direction, but surely AWS thinks of this as another piece of a product suite to compete with Databricks. Nontheless, I think the open embedded query engine approach DuckDB is spearheading is larger than one project, and I remain excited about the broader ecosystem (especially datafusion).

jefecoon 1mo ago

Any indication yet as to whether Quack, DuckLake, real-time materialized views dev will continue full-steam ahead? B/c myself and i know of many others very interested in seeing these efforts completed... :crossed-fingers:

lvl155 1mo ago

Man. DuckDB is one of my favorite tools in the past decade. It basically replaced pandas/Polars for me and I hope aws leaves it alone. Otoh, I am glad those guys got paid.

Fervicus 1mo ago

People using DuckDB, what's your use case? I use sqlite for a lot of my personal projects. What's a good use case for using DuckDB?

phainopepla2 1mo ago
DuckDB is for analytics, so OLAP instead of OLTP. If you're using the DB for normal transactions, stick with sqlite
- Fervicus 1mo ago
  Thanks, I gathered that much. I am curious what kind of stuff people are using it for, especially in their personal projects.
  - domper 1mo ago
    One great use case I've found: You can find monthly archives of every reddit comment on Academic torrents. These are huge NDJSON files compressed to .zst, named like 'RC_2026-01.zst'. The size is ~60GB compressed, 350GB+ uncompressed, per month. Most of the size is taken by the actual comment text. But I was only interested in calculating how many unique commenters subreddits have in a month so I only wanted to extract a few fields from it and discard the rest. If you use traditional tools like pandas or load the data to a database and then query it, you would quickly run out of RAM or storage space, especially when doing it on a basic laptop like I was. But with DuckDB it's just this: ``` SELECT lower(subreddit) AS subreddit, author FROM read_json(['RC_2026-01.zst', 'RC_2026-02.zst']) ``` DuckDB automatically handles decompression on the fly, figures out the schema, manages RAM so you won't OOM and so on. And even on my laptop that query takes like, 2 minutes? Which is super impressive to me.
    - Fervicus 1mo ago
      Oh, that's cool. And that's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. So thanks a lot!

alexwennerberg 1mo ago

I'm glad I stuck with SQLite. Governance is an important part of any open source project. SQLite has kept things narrow and focused, while DuckDB's philosophy is to do more and more, making it a general-purpose data science tool. I am old-fashioned in that I believe in the philosophy that software should "do one thing and do it well"

angulardragon03 1mo ago

Back in 2018, I took Hannes’ database course as part of my CS degree, which was one of the better ones I took. Over the years, I’ve seen DuckDB celebrated here (and other places), and now this. Congrats to both him and the Ducklabs team.

jmartrican 1mo ago

How do you suppose AWS can monetize it?

ganeshsivakumar 1mo ago

What if AWS eventually steer away duckdb team's bandwidth towards their AWS products or influence their work, since they are technically AWS employees.

o_m 1mo ago

What is the go to alternative from DuckDB?

gigatexal 1mo ago

This will be the engine for redshift now. They’ll make it read write and it’ll be magic.

arthurcolle 1mo ago

such a disappointing outcome

georgewfraser 1mo ago

AWS is a great home for DuckLabs. They just want people to use more compute and storage, so they have a degree of technology-neutrality. This is the key to allowing DuckDB to continue to grow in whatever directions are natural, rather than being warped by some kind of walled garden data platform strategy.

jonnat 1mo ago
Fair point, but no one is clearly articulating what AWS gets out of this. They don't get the DuckDB IP, that's owned by the foundation. All the work that the team at DuckLabs is putting in growing DuckDB and DuckLake are already in principle converting into compute/storage demand in AWS. So what does AWS actually want and how will it change DuckDB to accomplish it?
- senderista 1mo ago
  Maybe an OLAP db that scales down for serverless?

saxomoose 1mo ago

What does the financial counterpart of such a deal look like if the IP (main asset) is not part of the deal? Purely acqui-hiring?

saxomoose 1mo ago
"DuckLabs is joining AWS as a subsidiary" https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-...

shevy-java 1mo ago

That's horrible news.

otterley 1mo ago

More details on the acquisition here: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-changing-physics-of-analytics.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-... DuckLabs will be an AWS subsidiary, not subsumed into AWS itself.

adsharma 1mo ago

Surprised that there isn't more discussion of DuckDB source distributions. Why do we need a source distribution for a well regarded MIT licensed project? Because it's not easy to contribute code to DuckDB if you don't work at DuckLabs. The CI used to take 5 hours for a simple bug fix last I looked (may have improved since I flagged it on social media). There are two that I'm aware of: * Haybarn: https://rusty.today/blog/duckdb-extension-distribution-gap/ * Pygmy-Goose: https://github.com/Pygmy-Goose/pygmy-goose Pygmy-Goose is focused on making agentic workflows faster by splitting the repo, making git worktrees cheap and 5 minute cached CI on 3 major platforms.

adsharma 1mo ago
Several "Graph on DuckDB" efforts started on DuckDB and ended up reinventing a basic columnar codebase to innovate on because of these reasons. Even though people didn't document why, lack of outside contributor friendly flows is likely one of the reasons. KuzuDB folks worked on something called GRainDB in 2022: https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2022/graindb-a-relational-core-graph-relational-dbms.html https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2022/graindb-a-relational-core-graph... But circa 2023 decided to write their own. Work continues as LadybugDB. One of my long term goals is to find an integration point with DuckDB's table implementation as the "node table". Conversely at some point DuckDB could implement all the join algorithms and LadybugDB's REL table in their code base. For now, any talk of Graph on DuckDB is limited to DuckPGQ and the more recent entrant DuckGQL (both of which don't touch the storage layer which is the main reason why LadybugDB exists).

dtnm 1mo ago

Goobye DuckDB.

sakesun 1mo ago

AWS name is really negative. I trust the person leading DuckDB, nevertheless.

adeptima 1mo ago

If you are into geo spatial, worth to check on the same class project - SedonaDB https://github.com/apache/sedona-db https://github.com/apache/sedona-db "SedonaDB is an open-source single-node analytical database engine with geospatial as a first-class citizen" Apache License 2.0 https://github.com/apache/sedona-db/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/apache/sedona-db/blob/main/LICENSE MIT License https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/functions https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/func...

kevinbaiv 1mo ago

[flagged]

petrev01 1mo ago

This is easily one of the most disappointing pieces of tech news I've read in a long time. RIP indie duck-things.

kimseungyong 1mo ago

Who is better? AWS? Google? MS?

g8oz 1mo ago

I fear this is the end of the rapid pace of innovation that we've seen from DuckDb. "AWS has committed to supporting the continued development of DuckDB and its wider community for the long term." Those are just words man.

opem 1mo ago

Huge moment for the people behind duckdb. I've been using duckdb since the days of its preview releases and I knew they were gonna make it big. So, this one is well deserved. I hope duckdb's governance continues to stay under duckdb foundation.

swoorup 1mo ago

I work at a company heavily invested in AWS. Every now and then AWS developer advocates presents a way to adopt "latest" technology in the most obscure way possible.

SamEdwardes 1mo ago

Recent podcast that covers the acquisition: https://castro.fm/episode/OLVNYw https://castro.fm/episode/OLVNYw