DuckDB Monthly #46# is out. Spotlight: @marklit82, of 1.1 Billion Taxi Rides fame, who has been showing what DuckDB can do for GIS since 2023. Plus Jev typed AI answers in SQL, DuckDB 2.0's PEG parser and async S3 reads, and DuckLake maintenance.

DuckDB 2.0? Join us on 10/29 to walk through what's new, how it's impacting workload speeds, and lots more with Mehdi Ouazza. In his benchmarks, reading a 2.2 GB Parquet file from S3 dropped from 18.8 seconds to 7.7 seconds, and a deep recursive CTE went from several seconds to a tenth of a second...

DuckDB Monthly #45# is out. Spotlight: Vladimir Gribanov, creator of the DuckDB MSSQL extension (native TDS, no ODBC). His bulk-load tuning took 38M rows into SQL Server from 933s to 96s. Plus DuckLabs joins AWS, MotherDuck acquires Tower, and v2.0-alpha lands.

DuckDB 2.0 rewrote recursive CTEs. Walking a 20,000-commit git history: 1.8 to 16 s on 1.5.5, 0.10 s on 2.0, every run. 1.5: re-read the whole table every round. 2.0: read once, build a lookup, touch only the frontier's rows. Deep parent/child chains are where it shows.

DuckDB 2.0 alpha reads Parquet and CSV from S3 2x to 3x faster, with zero query changes. 1.5: each worker downloads, waits, decodes, repeats. 2.0: a download pool fetches ahead, workers only decode. Same laptop, same query: 18.8 s to 7.7 s. On by default. Full numbers, plus recursive CTEs and VARIANT:

When #DuckDB-Wasm# was launched in 2021, databases could not be persisted: everything lived in the Wasm heap and vanished when the tab closed. Keeping data meant serializing tables to Parquet, storing the bytes in IndexedDB, and re-registering them on the next page load. This was doable, but had to be handled at the application layer and was not offered out of the box by DuckDB-#Wasm#. Modern browsers now ship the Origin Private File System (OPFS), a per-origin, sandboxed file system with random-access reads and writes. DuckDB-Wasm can use it as a storage backend. This post by @carlo_piovesan and @GeertjanW shows you how:

Today is DuckDB 2.0 day! 🦆🎉 Congrats to the DuckDB team and everyone who has contributed. We're super excited for async I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, triggers, and a lot more. For MotherDuck users: our release and support come a few weeks after major versions of DuckDB. This is because we're working to make sure everything is stable and scalable for all customer workloads as DuckDB rapidly evolves its engine with every release. Read the full announcement from the DuckDB team: Join us on Oct 29 for a livestream with Alex Monahan diving deep into our favorite parts of “Cinnamon Teal”. Save your spot ->

2022 plan: hack on DuckDB, learn Rust. What happened instead: investors funded the company before there was one. Our CEO Jordan Tigani on Beyond Coding with @PatrickAkil_ — Giving DuckDB Labs co-founder shares, two years to a product people would pay for, and whether dashboards survive the age of agents.

What’s Next for DuckDB? 🦆🤔 Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, was recently interviewed by Kris Jenkins of the Developer Voices podcast on every challenge, reward, twist, and turn of building a database as popular as DuckDB. From the early days of the product to the most recent acquisition of @ducklabs_com by @awscloud, Hannes – and what it means for the future of the open source DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack projects*. It’s an interview as much as a story – an odyssey of what it means to build not only an open source product, but also a community, a company, and what success looks like in the day to day journey along the way. 📺 Watch the video episode (or read the transcript) here: 🎧 Or, listen wherever you get your podcasts. *Spoilers: DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and other open source projects in the DuckStack will remain open source and the project’s intellectual property, MIT license, and trademark are controlled by the DuckDB Foundation. The DuckLabs company is joining AWS, but the OSS projects remain OSS and controlled solely by the Foundation. 🦆 🦆