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daviewales 3 hours 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 3 hours 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.
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.
xingped 51 minutes ago [-]
>...sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone
Hah. Never have I ever heard a sentence that described Amazon less.
applecrazy 21 minutes ago [-]
what do you mean? amazon maintains a ton of open source projects, including a pure FOSS version of Elasticsearch called Opensearch
switchbak 6 minutes ago [-]
Top-level troll: that's not a "version" of Elastic Search, it's a fork of ES specifically created due to ES's licence change that made it more difficult for AWS to extract money from it at Elastic's expense.
Not that I like either actor in this particular play, but this isn't exactly an example of community oriented goodwill on Amazon's part.
Bjartr 2 hours ago [-]
The past tells us not to hold our breath
speleding 1 hours ago [-]
They now updated it. That bit is indeed gone.
basch 25 minutes ago [-]
Still says
>Independence: We are fully founder-owned and not externally funded. Our priorities align with the long-term health of the project and its users.
xnx 1 hours ago [-]
Not sure why the submitter changed the title from the page: "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"
runtime_terror 47 minutes ago [-]
For clicks
Scubabear68 3 hours ago [-]
This is an important distinction, I hope the title can be changed.
I was really surprised when I first came across DuckDB at how good at it is for its target use cases. It is a game changer for me for the "local analytics" space, and its ability to scale up to a large degree helps a lot.
It is simply awesome to be able to point DuckDB at a mess of CSV and other files and have an instant database on top of it that I can run regular SQL over, and it is fast and just works.
bushbaba 2 hours ago [-]
It’s faster than trino and spark for 99% of your use cases. Only once the datasets reach the 100GiB to TiB range is trino/spark faster. Compute is scaling vertically faster than Data Eng/Analytics dataset growth, over time DuckDB will be the better choice.
fsckboy 3 hours ago [-]
you raised a good point but (et al) didn't touch on the meaningful questions: where does the "core team" of developers of DuckDB now reside? are they now "captured/cashing-in/getting paid" at AWS, or will meaningful MIT-licensed development of DuckDB continue in a robust way outside of commercial enterprises with proprietary needs that are not aligned with where the project was going?
hobofan 4 hours 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.
fullstop 4 hours ago [-]
Surely they are better than Google in this regard.
hobofan 3 hours ago [-]
AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
nixon_why69 2 hours ago [-]
Google is better but it's an incredibly low bar.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
They should be fine as long as they remember to use the new cover sheets. I'm sure they got a copy of the memo.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
fwip 3 hours ago [-]
Youtube is another famous example.
stingraycharles 2 hours ago [-]
Google has such a much better reputation when it comes to contributing to and understanding open source. It’s unfair to Google to put Amazon above them.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
idontneedcoffee 2 hours ago [-]
..a strategy valid in the good ol' days when a complete rewrite of the currently non-licenseable non-protectable underlying desings and ideas would not cost you 200$ on tokens to reimplement in a different or even in the same language.. maybe SW patents will be a thing soon .. and inadvertently become another nail in the coffin of FOSS and SW development in general, who knows
richwater 2 hours ago [-]
What business model do MIT licensed projects even have? If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
bch 49 minutes ago [-]
> If you want to offer support contracts and actually make people use them, don't use MIT. You can't have you cake (accepting public contributions and free labor) and eat it (sole profiteering) too.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
RMS addressed the business model from the very beginning: it's services and consulting. He practiced what he preached.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
homarp 1 hours ago [-]
RMS promotes GPL, not MIT licensed software.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
bigstrat2003 35 minutes ago [-]
It helps just fine. The original software is still there, available for anyone to use for free. AWS et al can't take that away from us, no matter what they choose to do with their fork.
applfanboysbgon 33 minutes ago [-]
When they say "doesn't help", they're talking about the developers of the original software you want to use for free getting to eat food and have a roof over their head.
applfanboysbgon 36 minutes ago [-]
It has an extremely low ceiling. You literally cannot make consumer-targeted software if you want to survive while writing open-source code. Services and consulting is strictly B2B, and services and consulting for open-source software is capable of supporting a population of like 1% of existing software developers. Advocating for this dogmatic ideal that would cull the field by 99% is ridiculous.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
kccqzy 1 hours ago [-]
Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
pessimizer 24 minutes ago [-]
GPL is not MIT. If your software is GPL, you can sell it relicensed as MIT for income.
bigstrat2003 38 minutes ago [-]
I'm not seeing how MIT licensing has anything to do with your ability to use support contacts as a business model. Yeah, nothing constrains the potential customer to purchase support, but that's just as true of GPL licensed software. I can download GPL software and never pay a dime for a support contract, just like MIT software.
runtime_terror 46 minutes ago [-]
Golang is alive and kicking still :shrug:
kodoman 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like google do the most innovative projects of all the big companies.
ferguess_k 4 hours ago [-]
Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
qaq 3 hours ago [-]
Man I admire AWS marketing team for convincing people DynamoDB is a very good product.
100 items max per Transaction
BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max
low write limits on same key
Item size 400 KB max
etc.
ferguess_k 1 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, I don't really get any chance to seriously use or manage OLTP databases (mostly working with OLAP ones myself) so it is good to know about this. The 400KB limit is indeed very limiting -- I had to truncate some data because of that.
I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
nixon_why69 2 hours ago [-]
The reason it's good is because, although it is bad, you never have to worry about it in terms of maintenance, admin or scale. It's like lambda for databases.
For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
senderista 1 hours ago [-]
They have published 2 academic papers about it. What more do you want, operational details?
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 1 hours ago [-]
Nothing to do with DynamoDB except the name.
sargun 3 hours ago [-]
This is massively different from DynamoDB.
ihsw 3 hours ago [-]
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ihsw 3 hours ago [-]
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wavemode 3 hours ago [-]
> Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive
I'm curious what you mean by this. I would have said the exact opposite - AWS tends to keep projects around for a very long time. They haven't acquired very many open-source projects, but the few that they have are all still running as far as I know.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
Fig, was one of them but was only partially opens source IIRC. CLI autocomplete and script team sync. Turned into/integrated into Amazon Q, which turned into Kiro CLI, which AFAIK doesn't share any functionality with the original product nowadays.
hugs 2 hours ago [-]
who currently has the most regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive?
scotho3 1 hours ago [-]
<crickets>
thataccount 3 hours ago [-]
Goodbye DuckDB and hello surprise enterprise DuckDB that has special features that you can't live without that only work with Enterprise DuckDB.
lolive 20 minutes ago [-]
LDAP support :)
pbkompasz 56 minutes ago [-]
AI, you forgot AI
brokencode 3 minutes ago [-]
Who needs SQL when you can just ask the DB for the records you want?
cmiles8 3 hours 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.
rklaehn 2 hours 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.
dgudkov 32 minutes ago [-]
> Place sounds like a total mess.
What big corp is not a total mess?
wpietri 3 hours 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.
eitally 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly, there's just a huge amount of thrash across the cloud & SaaS industries as a whole. It's not a lot better at Google (way behind OAI & Anthropic on coding & local AI harnesses), Microsoft (no meaningful frontier model R&D to speak of, and a constantly eroding Windows business), the neoclouds (impossible to source adequate infrastructure and are existentially threatened by the hyperscalers (especially Google) if they can't keep up with demand, chipmakers (NVIDIA vs AMD vs Qualcomm vs Apple vs the long tail of specialty shops like Cerebras), data center pure plays (legislative & community pushback, natural resources, infrastructure availability), and the SaaS folks ("let's see if AI can do it").
It's both a great time to be gold mining in tech, and also a terrible time to be a bit employee.
pepperoni_pizza 4 hours ago [-]
Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
If there's no price tag mentioned, it's likely not generational wealth.
willseth 29 minutes ago [-]
At Google's size, they're not required to disclose acquisition prices well into the hundreds of millions
compiler-guy 24 minutes ago [-]
They were acquired by AWS, not Google. But the point still stands.
fourseventy 58 minutes ago [-]
There is no way the price tag is less than tens of millions right?
fidotron 3 hours ago [-]
Also European so almost certainly underpriced themselves.
tyre 3 hours 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.
yurishimo 3 hours ago [-]
How much do you really need for generational wealth? In my opinion, if you're more than 10 years away from retirement and received a surprise $1 million, you're setup for the rest of your life and your children as well assuming they don't immediately blow it all when you die (that's what a good trust should be for).
Assuming historical returns, your money doubles roughly every 7 years, so within the rest of your lifetime, that 1 million should turn into at least 8. That's an extremely comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle on the interest payments alone. If your children don't spend it all, your grandchildren would easily have private jet money by the time their parents retire.
asib 3 hours ago [-]
1 mil is not generational wealth in the US. It is a big chunk of money, no doubt. It’ll buy a reasonable 2-3 bedroom house in the city I live in, with nothing left over. No one’s definition of generational wealth involves not touching the money for two generations…
3 hours ago [-]
fwip 3 hours ago [-]
The median home price is around $400K. You don't have to live somewhere stupid expensive.
jshen 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that's not generational wealth.
fwip 2 hours ago [-]
We must be operating on different definitions. Generational wealth means you have enough money to meaningfully improve the lives of your kids and give them a leg-up on life. A million dollars is enough to buy a house for each of your 2.5 kids.
If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
ethagnawl 19 minutes ago [-]
> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
Well said.
Where I live, one million dollars would allow me to pay off my house, open healthily sized investment accounts for my kids, pad my investment account, setup a trust and, overall, set my family up for a comfortable life in the future. I don't see how that isn't generational wealth.
asib 1 hours ago [-]
Generational wealth generally is used to mean something like you and at least your children can live very comfortably off of investment income for the rest of your lives, I.e. none of you have to work for a living. That’s why sibling’s def of 1.5-5m per child is much closer to the commonly understood meaning.
We can debate “live comfortably” if you want, but no 4.5 people are doing that from the investment proceeds of 1m.
What you are describing is kind of more like social mobility.
MeetingsBrowser 1 hours ago [-]
The commonly accepted definition of generational wealth ranges from around 1.5 to 5 million per child.
fwip 1 hours ago [-]
I can only find sources that define it the way I said, but I'm sure that folks who think a million dollars isn't enough to buy a house disagree.
jimbokun 26 minutes ago [-]
Generational wealth is generally used to describe not just a comfortable personal retirement but your children and their children and so on never needing to work if they are remotely responsible with the money.
pessimizer 19 minutes ago [-]
> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
Generational wealth is definitely not "affect[ing] how much money you can leave your kids." That's an equivocation - if you're leaving your kids a dollar, another dollar will "affect how much money you can leave your kids."
edit: you need a million dollars to securely retire at all, and that's if your parents, kids, or you don't get sick. If they do, a million is not only not "generational wealth" but it may not even last you three years.
slfnflctd 2 hours ago [-]
I have to agree, yurishimo's assumption of returns is wildly optimistic.
At a more sane expected return of 5% annually, you get $50k a year to live off of to just keep what you have (or rather, watch it slowly erode in value due to inflation).
That is basically a one person income, maybe two adults if you pinch pennies and live in a crappy apartment or a low-end house in a midwestern suburb.
You can get a lot more lucky with a million bucks than you can with 10k if you gamble, but there are no guarantees. Risk tolerance is the most impactful variable. For those in the low risk tolerance group, I think you'd need at least 2 mil these days. And that's with being frugal, as well as probably not having much left over for kids.
menaerus 2 hours ago [-]
Assuming you're investing aggressively and not touching that money for the next 20 years, with the nominal return of 6% per year, adjusted for the inflation rate of 3% per year, 1M will increase to 1.8M. Not sure how you came up with 8M.
1123581321 2 hours ago [-]
To do that, you would have to never touch the money and invest aggressively. Most wouldn’t do that unless they didn’t need the money, i.e. already rich so not newfound wealth.
You would also have to train your kids to responsibly use the money without demonstrating it, as you’d just be hoarding it. People don’t have a good track record there, either.
I think the best you could do generationally with a million would be to try to invest moderately and draw down a small percentage (2-3%) to demonstrate fully considered use of the money. This would keep you in a middle class income but give you more ability to donate charitably, vacation together, let one spouse retire earlier, solve a financial crisis for a child, etc.
Letting them in on the thinking would give them a good chance to handle a high six/low seven figure inheritance, depending on how the investing goes.
jimbokun 28 minutes ago [-]
You said 10 years away from retirement so that’s closer to 2 million than 8.
MeetingsBrowser 1 hours ago [-]
> How much do you really need for generational wealth?
Common definition is somewhere between 1.5 to 5 million per child.
_zoltan_ 27 minutes ago [-]
1 mil as generational wealth? what?
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
I'd agree with that sentiment but that number would be more like $5M (which is nothing in the context of this acquisition). Inflation is not going to relent and having enough to actually enjoy some of that payout to have pseudo FU money and leave enough invested for children and grandchildren (a well-managed trust).
Buying a house in desirable areas is going to be in the ~ $1M range, college is going to be hundreds of thousands, etc.
nixon_why69 2 hours ago [-]
Assuming historical returns might be a little unsafe at a point in time near the peak of a bubble popping.
hobofan 3 hours ago [-]
> I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare.
MotherDuck, a semi-competitor of theirs has raised $100mil in funding. DuckLabs has reportedly taken no external funding (so all ownership is with the founders) and was profitable with 30+ employees.
On the sidelines, other companies behind beloved open source products, like Astral, Astro, Bun are getting bought left and right.
With that as a backdrop, I think they should have been able to get quite a good payout.
datadrivenangel 2 hours ago [-]
DuckLabs is the company that does consulting and DuckDB development, the DuckDB foundation actually owns DuckDB the project.
The DuckDB foundation owns some equity in MotherDuck, which is a data lakehouse platform based on DuckDB, and all three have been moving closely together in making DuckDB better locally as well as in the role of a query engine that really threatens a lot of amazon's role in data lakehouses. DuckDB in the hands of a good team means that you can use AWS almost only for storage, instead of using any of the managed services.
3 hours ago [-]
tormeh 3 hours 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.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
Datafusion has all of the individual pieces, especially if you just want to data analysis, but is far from an embedded database.
Indexes, transactions, a first-class storage format are all things that come included with DuckDB, that you won't have with Datafusion.
andriy_koval 12 minutes ago [-]
indexes are very weak in duckdb, need to fit memory.
Is Datafusion related to Polars at all? I ask because you mentioned Rust integration.
hocuspocus 1 hours 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 11 minutes ago [-]
Awesome, thank you for the detail.
colinmarc 3 hours ago [-]
Came here to post the same thing. DataFusion is fantastic.
wqtz 14 minutes 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.
datadrivenangel 3 hours ago [-]
Title is "DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source"
ray_v 3 hours ago [-]
This gave me a shot of panic when I read the headline - thanks for correcting the record.
janpeuker 3 hours 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.
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.
tuvix 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed that DuckDB as a server feels far from their initial mission, but how does async IO divert from it?
janpeuker 2 hours 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
0898 1 hours 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?
toast0 58 minutes 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.
andriy_koval 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
nothing prevents to build single database which would cover all such answers. Its engineering, funding and distribution problems: no-one built it yet.
25 minutes ago [-]
xnx 1 hours 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 1 hours 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 60 minutes 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.
1 hours ago [-]
log101 3 hours 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 52 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't be the worst thing, when I last used it, I got some c++ specific errors.
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.
batdata 3 hours 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/
3 hours ago [-]
tiffanyh 3 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
You're right - MotherDuck just got Jeffed.
fidotron 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?
jakozaur 2 hours 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 1 hours ago [-]
Also repackaged Blazegraph as Neptune (the original project was shut down after acquisition).
1 hours ago [-]
pid-1 5 minutes ago [-]
Congrats!
ferguess_k 4 hours 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.
karakanb 3 hours 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.
smithclay 1 minutes 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
pepperoni_pizza 1 hours ago [-]
Athena already has Trino and Spark engines, it could totally have DuckDB one too.
nicornk 3 hours ago [-]
This would be my bet and hope as well.
bijowo1676 24 minutes ago [-]
Great move for AWS, does it mean AWS wants to build competitor to clickhouse ?
pkilgore 19 minutes ago [-]
Avoid antitrust scrutiny with this one weird trick.
srameshc 1 hours 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.
dkga 1 hours 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!
schmuhblaster 4 hours ago [-]
I've been super impressed by DuckDB ever since first trying it out about 3 three years ago. Congrats to the founders!
nightski 2 hours ago [-]
Remember when big co used to just donate to open source projects to help them out instead of acquiring/dominating them?
m1keil 4 hours ago [-]
Waiting for QuackDB the OSS spin off any second now
rustyconover 3 hours ago [-]
I've already created Haybarn which is Query.Farm's distribution of DuckDB:
> "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 3 hours 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.”
steveshreeve 50 minutes ago [-]
Shameless plug for DuckDB Harbor - DuckDB server over HTTP (UDS or TCP/IP). Includes a new harbor based DuckDB CLI called pilot:
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 3 hours ago [-]
like vector search ?
yipinwong 2 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
May I ask how DuckDB is making vector search better than others ?
akshay_akula 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah the foundation is doing the heavy lifting here. Amazon's track record with technically interesting projects after a reorg is not great.
newtwentysix 4 hours ago [-]
super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.
eventualcomp 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 1 hours 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.
nobleach 2 hours ago [-]
It can go different ways. Redis, Elastic Search, MySQL, and Java all have different stories with some common threads.
grim_io 4 hours ago [-]
Complete control over what gets merged and worked on by the core team.
orian 4 hours 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
dzonga 1 hours ago [-]
AWS acquiring DuckLabs is massive. nice move.
one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.
hckshr 3 hours 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!
nicornk 2 hours ago [-]
I hope AWS doesn’t dilute the DuckDB brand by calling their managed DuckDB offering SageMaker<something>…
pantsforbirds 2 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping this means we get an rds + s3 implementation of ducklake from AWS: https://ducklake.select/
Bluestein 3 hours ago [-]
Extend, embrace, quack.-
tosh 4 hours ago [-]
did not expect that
I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright
data-ottawa 3 hours ago [-]
Also did not expect this. I did expect MotherDuck to acquire them at some point (in fact, I kinda thought they already did!)
meerita 4 hours ago [-]
I am glad for them. Does anyone know the amount of the operation?
h2aichat 2 hours ago [-]
AWS is always hungry. Watch out PostgreSQL
jbonatakis 1 hours 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.
baba_vanga 3 hours ago [-]
Prediction: this is start of an aquisition spree by AWS.
mohitpaddhariya 53 minutes ago [-]
Insane!!!!
otabdeveloper4 1 hours ago [-]
Wow, that sucks balls.
Boxxed 3 hours ago [-]
Can we stop consolidating everything under a handful of massive companies?
2 hours ago [-]
theappsecguy 2 hours ago [-]
This is awful news.
nprateem 3 hours ago [-]
I see a site like https://ducklabs.com/ and it's clear I'm waaaay over thinking my website.
jknoepfler 3 hours 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?
igtztorrero 3 hours ago [-]
Please No No No why.....
igtztorrero 3 hours ago [-]
History repeats itself; the same thing will happen as with MySQL—when it was acquired by Oracle, it stagnated.
simlevesque 3 hours ago [-]
I said "Oh shit !" out loud in a meeting.
dmoose 3 hours 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.
apercu 2 hours 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?
add-sub-mul-div 4 hours ago [-]
We just can't have nice things, can we?
geodel 3 hours ago [-]
Just like press freedom is for those who own press, nice things are for those who can buy nice things.
systems 4 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
If you need a fork, I've already done most of the hard work for all of you.
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
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/
[2] https://ducklabs.com/
[3] https://motherduck.com/
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.
Hah. Never have I ever heard a sentence that described Amazon less.
Not that I like either actor in this particular play, but this isn't exactly an example of community oriented goodwill on Amazon's part.
>Independence: We are fully founder-owned and not externally funded. Our priorities align with the long-term health of the project and its users.
I was really surprised when I first came across DuckDB at how good at it is for its target use cases. It is a game changer for me for the "local analytics" space, and its ability to scale up to a large degree helps a lot.
It is simply awesome to be able to point DuckDB at a mess of CSV and other files and have an instant database on top of it that I can run regular SQL over, and it is fast and just works.
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.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
[2] https://sqlite.org/support.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272832
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
100 items max per Transaction BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max low write limits on same key Item size 400 KB max etc.
I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
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.
I'm curious what you mean by this. I would have said the exact opposite - AWS tends to keep projects around for a very long time. They haven't acquired very many open-source projects, but the few that they have are all still running as far as I know.
I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate it with all the other craziness going on.
What big corp is not a total mess?
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.
It's both a great time to be gold mining in tech, and also a terrible time to be a bit employee.
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.
Assuming historical returns, your money doubles roughly every 7 years, so within the rest of your lifetime, that 1 million should turn into at least 8. That's an extremely comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle on the interest payments alone. If your children don't spend it all, your grandchildren would easily have private jet money by the time their parents retire.
If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
Well said.
Where I live, one million dollars would allow me to pay off my house, open healthily sized investment accounts for my kids, pad my investment account, setup a trust and, overall, set my family up for a comfortable life in the future. I don't see how that isn't generational wealth.
We can debate “live comfortably” if you want, but no 4.5 people are doing that from the investment proceeds of 1m.
What you are describing is kind of more like social mobility.
Generational wealth is definitely not "affect[ing] how much money you can leave your kids." That's an equivocation - if you're leaving your kids a dollar, another dollar will "affect how much money you can leave your kids."
edit: you need a million dollars to securely retire at all, and that's if your parents, kids, or you don't get sick. If they do, a million is not only not "generational wealth" but it may not even last you three years.
At a more sane expected return of 5% annually, you get $50k a year to live off of to just keep what you have (or rather, watch it slowly erode in value due to inflation).
That is basically a one person income, maybe two adults if you pinch pennies and live in a crappy apartment or a low-end house in a midwestern suburb.
You can get a lot more lucky with a million bucks than you can with 10k if you gamble, but there are no guarantees. Risk tolerance is the most impactful variable. For those in the low risk tolerance group, I think you'd need at least 2 mil these days. And that's with being frugal, as well as probably not having much left over for kids.
You would also have to train your kids to responsibly use the money without demonstrating it, as you’d just be hoarding it. People don’t have a good track record there, either.
I think the best you could do generationally with a million would be to try to invest moderately and draw down a small percentage (2-3%) to demonstrate fully considered use of the money. This would keep you in a middle class income but give you more ability to donate charitably, vacation together, let one spouse retire earlier, solve a financial crisis for a child, etc.
Letting them in on the thinking would give them a good chance to handle a high six/low seven figure inheritance, depending on how the investing goes.
Common definition is somewhere between 1.5 to 5 million per child.
Buying a house in desirable areas is going to be in the ~ $1M range, college is going to be hundreds of thousands, etc.
MotherDuck, a semi-competitor of theirs has raised $100mil in funding. DuckLabs has reportedly taken no external funding (so all ownership is with the founders) and was profitable with 30+ employees.
On the sidelines, other companies behind beloved open source products, like Astral, Astro, Bun are getting bought left and right.
With that as a backdrop, I think they should have been able to get quite a good payout.
The DuckDB foundation owns some equity in MotherDuck, which is a data lakehouse platform based on DuckDB, and all three have been moving closely together in making DuckDB better locally as well as in the role of a query engine that really threatens a lot of amazon's role in data lakehouses. DuckDB in the hands of a good team means that you can use AWS almost only for storage, instead of using any of the managed services.
From my own experience I can say it integrates far better into your Rust app than DuckDB does.
Well over 100 monthly contributors, too.
Indexes, transactions, a first-class storage format are all things that come included with DuckDB, that you won't have with Datafusion.
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.
1) https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights
"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.
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?
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.
nothing prevents to build single database which would cover all such answers. Its engineering, funding and distribution problems: no-one built it yet.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Now, with Snowflake and Databricks earning big bucks in the intelligence era, time to gain market share by having DuckLabs under its ownership?
I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.
* Cloudflare also seems to have gotten the same idea right with R2 Data Catalog
learn about it here: https://query.farm/haybarn/
Presumably the issue is Haybarn-specific?
The CI extension build runs are still public on GitHub, but may have expired, if you bump your git sha ref it will rerun.
Looks like this is the failed build https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn/haybarn-community-exte... but logs have expired
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.
https://github.com/shreeve/duckdb-harbor
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.
DuckDB to the rescue.
Also embed the crap outta DuckDB locally in local agents running on VPS, etc
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.
one feature I can't wait from the DuckDb team are real-time materialized views.
"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!
I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright
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?
On the other hand, do we have to live in an oligarchy?
https://query.farm/haybarn/
Or
https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn
I've been releasing the versions all the way since 1.5.3 and all community extensions.
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
In 1.5 - Haybarn has its own signing key, but its much faster to get extensions released and deployed.