AWS Acquires DuckDB Creator DuckLabs
DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based team behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB, is joining Amazon Web Services (AWS). The acquisition, effective early September, will keep DuckDB and related projects like DuckLake and Quack under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation retaining stewardship. The team stays in Amsterdam, and AWS commits to long-term support. DuckDB sees over a million daily downloads, and the move aims to scale its impact.
We believe the DuckDB revolution can grow by another couple of orders of magnitude.
- hobofan
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.
- daviewales
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
- cmiles8
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.
- tormeh
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.
- pepperoni_pizza
Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
- willbeddow
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).
- janpeuker
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.
- 0898
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?
- datadrivenangel
Title is "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"
- adsharma
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.