A Preview of DuckDB v2.0 (duckdb.org)

644 points by ibotty 21 hours ago

otter-in-a-suit 18 hours ago

Super excited about Quack (partially due to the name). I use duckdb for both analytics and runtime, but I do have to serve/handle/manage a giant, multi-GiB duckdb file as effectively a runtime artifact[1]. I'm aware that this isn't the _perfect_ database for this, but the mix of it being fast, having spatial support, sane coding interfaces, great dbt integration, and me being able to do everything between "run a giant several hundred step dbt pipeline" to "query the output of said pipeline" to "read/query a csv on disk" with the exact same tool is just so nice. If I could centrally manage said asset more akin to a traditional database, I'd be very happy.

I've partially solved this with separate databases for different steps in the data pipeline(s) and have even experimented with Clickhouse as a complete alternative, but I really like way too many things about duckdb to replace it.

[1]: If you care: https://skaldmaps.com/blog/2026/07/zip-codes-are-a-bad-spati...

mediaman 18 hours ago

I built a platform for some midsize companies in a specific vertical that is basically a data warehouse with some LLM-driven dashboarding and query tools on top. Typical data size 5-150gb. So I built a service layer around duckdb, where each tenant gets their own duckdb. I'm also in the boat of knowing that duckdb is not the perfect solution for this (the classic use case is running it against local data on a laptop), but there's so much I like about it, and it's really nice that each tenant can have total separation with custom schemas and that it's straightforward to pile data into object storage and form your own lake.

And now with things like quack the sharp points around concurrency are relaxing, and it feels like the compromises of using it this way are disappearing.

ljosifov 13 minutes ago

Similar. Noticed DuckDB ever since an old article 'what db should I use' for local small data warehousing. The author was blown away that DuckDB seemed super naturally quick. It was I think columnar store + compression facilitated that? It made duckdb load compressed + on the fly decompress = faster than even reading the uncompressed data. Had forgotten most of it. But was used to mmap-ed files + columnar storing of Kdb. Was pleased that the author was clued to notice the power of that.

Then more recently I was given a somewhat random task to organise a motley collection of web scrapes, historic data, realtime data, data to be fetched on demand dispersed in semi-random collections. DuckDB as backing store + Claude Code that I discovered in Nov-2025 (with suitable skills and schemas) = a data agent where I could tell CC *in English* complicated data requests!? And CC would write glue shell and python code, write SQL and run it against DuckDB that housed most of the data, fetch new data, munge join filter, and present it to the user as "your data is in data slash blah". It seemed a miracle unfolded in front of my eyes! So yeah - fond of DuckDB. :-)

Latter I read this https://openai.com/index/inside-our-in-house-data-agent/ and thought "but of course".

allan_s 16 hours ago

As somebody new to this and with a use case very similar to yours , what would have been a more suitable solution for this ?

The guy who first built the architecture made the same decision as yours (I.e one local duckdb for each tenant to work as a copy of big query/their data warehouse) and I dont know what the state of the art for this kind of use cases ?

otter-in-a-suit 10 hours ago

mediaman 13 hours ago

8note 11 hours ago

tccole 17 hours ago

I feel like familiarity and ease of use and “good enough” beat out the perfect db for the job in many occasions.

dmix 17 hours ago

> to "read/query a csv on disk"

I discovered DuckDB looking for a way to analyze Nginx access.log's and it's an amazing tool. I believe it should be a standard tool like ripgrep for devs.

ignaciovdk 17 hours ago

Check it out Arc, I think that we can help there, plus, use DuckDB as a engine: https://github.com/Basekick-Labs/arc

paoliniluis 17 hours ago

Hey this is neat and I just found out you're from BA, Argentina. I would love you be part of dataengine.ar and maybe talk about arc?

ignaciovdk 13 hours ago

grvdrm 9 hours ago

Nice post and you have me checking out your broader site and product!

jtbaker 20 hours ago

DuckDB is one of the things I've been most excited about in a long time. Introduced it to projects at 3 companies since 2023, greatly lowering resource requirements and running it in a variety of environments. Just having the ability to do out of core bigger than memory data processing on lower end consumer grade hardware is remarkable.

Thanks to the team for everything!

throwaw12 20 hours ago

Curious to learn more about how people are using it?

Are they downloading parquet files and running analyses locally, or are they connecting to Iceberg-like data lake and leveraging DuckDBs query engine capabilities or have you exposed an interface (REST, UI) to query your data?

markus_zhang 9 minutes ago

I actually used it in an interview. I downloaded the csv/parquet file and load it into DuckDB.

In the future, I also plan to use it for testing production data pipelines: imagine you have a streaming cdc pipeline running in development env, and at the end you can dump every parquet into DuckDB as a verification — the end result should be the same. I could also use the same Database for testing, but I like DuckDB somehow.

arealaccount 20 hours ago

We use DuckDB WASM with parquet to build dashboards in-browser. It's cool to be able to write SQL directly in a browser and not have to rely on REST/Graphql/etc to access the data layer.

jayct 17 hours ago

jtbaker 19 hours ago

I've got a couple of different use cases:

- ETL pipelines running on K8s nodes. Using their streaming processing engine means I can run smaller pods/nodes if needed, for datasets that may have required large dataframe-like transformations that may have buffered a big dataset into memory previously.

- A CLI distributed to an internal team to do a postprocessing step on a large modeling dataset - to get it into a consumable format and upload it to a bucket as a .db file.

- A SvelteKit app that used the node duckdb bindings to attach to the .db on the bucket and explore the results through a suite of BI tools. These tables have millions of rows, and would be pretty heavy to store in PG. The DuckDB version works really, really well.

staticautomatic 15 hours ago

tccole 17 hours ago

drums8787 19 hours ago

We use WASM DuckDB as the target for an in-browser agentic feature. Generated SQL runs against the user's individual tables that then feed in-browser dashboards.

Excellent performance.

AlfeG 5 hours ago

Realtime full MSSQL database mirroring into DuckDb to do a complex reporting. Everything is in-process. DuckDb database mapped to temp storage and recreated on app restart. Still order of magnitude faster then doing a direct query over MSSQL Server (2ms vs 40+ seconds on same query).

Some devs in team still cannot believe that there is no cheating, that it's possibe, that some 60Mb DB can do queries faster then MSSQL Server with just around 250Mb+ of memory overhead.

(.Net 10 + DuckDB.NET package)

phqb 13 hours ago

I'm using duckdb/duckdb-go as query engine for my Go services: moving hot data from Postgres to Parquet files on S3 or to Iceberg; querying cold data on Iceberg, ... instead of using different Go libraries.

tccole 17 hours ago

Yes.

I have used it with WASM for some web applications for web use. I have also used with locally for querying 100 gigs of data. And I have used it in the cloud as the serverless gold layer for Apache superset.

peesem 18 hours ago

maybe a niche use case but i've found it's perfect to store & query random trivia/gameshow questions based on filters for my personal clones of things like Family Feud and Jeopardy

malshe 13 hours ago

I use it locally with parquet files

arpinum 17 hours ago

ETL from DynamoDB into Ducklake

fifilura 19 hours ago

My favourite is AWS Athena (backed by Trino).

"If we use this we get indefinite RAM indefinite CPU and do not need to host a server".

I had an impression that DuckDB was not great at distributing work to other machines, but good at doing it locally? Am I wrong?

abirch 19 hours ago

DuckDB out of the box may not be great. But you have DuckLake, Quack, and even DeepSeek made their own distributed DB based on DuckDB: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/smallpond

jtbaker 18 hours ago

I don't think DuckDB itself can coordinate work across multiple nodes. But you could put it behind an HTTP layer and scale horizontally based on resource utilization?

ericpauley 19 hours ago

Athena + Clickhouse has been an absolute game changer for us. Perfect combo for OLAP + deeper filtering that we can’t necessarily pre-index for.

therealdrag0 14 hours ago

Hate to bring it up, but 10,000 commits in less than 6 months is a lot. Is AI a major contribute here?

Is AI use for accelerated development of a beloved tool like DuckDB enough to quiet lingering doubters?

nh2 11 hours ago

If you merge PRs that have commit mesages like this, it's easy to arrive at 10000 commits in 6 months:

    rename to NodePointer instead
    format
    Revert "format"
    Revert "rename to NodePointer instead"
    rename to OptionalNodePtr
    woops
    update comment
    slot renames
    more renames
Source: https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/pull/23605

If every Ctrl+S is a commit, it'll go up fast.

"woops"!

Mic92 7 hours ago

They seem to squash PRs using the pr description as commit message. So this sounds like a good approach to me.

mastermage 5 hours ago

i love woops

hermitcrab 2 hours ago

I'm looking for a lightweight client-server database where I can connect 3 or 4 GUI clients to a single database and concurrently edit the database. Low transaction volumes (probably a few edits per minute). Would DuckDb + Quack be suitable?

srameshc 20 hours ago

I <3 DuckDB. It has become one of my go to tools for storing, data processing , integrations and now even graph. More importantly it's fun to use because it is so portable. Looking forward to v2.

fragebogen 20 hours ago

Ditto! Very happy with the upcoming async support! Now it'll be a nice little db for serving http traffic as well!

d3Xt3r 13 hours ago

What advantages does it have over SQLite in your use cases? Can you give any examples?

briHass 12 hours ago

Not OP, but for me, the lack of essentially any type system in SQLite makes it a total no-go for storing data long-term or that more than one application needs to access. Date/time being an especially painful footgun in SQLite.

I view SQLite as something a single application can use for storing state/settings/misc operational data instead of directly writing files, especially if the data being stored is relational or needs ACID. As soon as the data itself has meaning and structure per se, you're better off with something that can help enforce and describe the data: rich datatypes, foreign keys that aren't optional, etc.

dm03514 11 hours ago

<3 duckdb run realtime analytics pipeline using a (moderately popular) stream processing engine I built on top of DuckDB. Looking forward to what duckdb provides in terms of perf out of the box!

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

DuckDB has been a fantastic engine to build on (in python), and processes thousands of events per second, day in an day out, without issue

rubenfiszel 3 hours ago

We have bet early on DuckDB and Ducklake for Windmill and couldn't be happier. The focus on server/client mode is interesting, it opens the way for orchestrators like ours to have "lite" workers/jobs for duckdb that connect to one central bigger beefy nodes and improve the overall efficieny. I'm very curious if benchmark shows that there are performance benefits to do so thanks to co-location and overall less cpu cycles wastes.

remywang 16 hours ago

If you like DuckDB, please consider funding DB research [1]!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336147

gw32 9 hours ago

> The VARIANT type shipped in DuckDB v1.5, and the way to think about it is JSON on steroids. Basically, imagine if JSON were fast. [...] DuckDB automatically detects the common structure hidden in your semi-structured data and “shreds” it, so it compresses well in storage

I am really looking forward to this hitting v2.0. I can't stand uncompressed JSON - so space-inefficient. But heterogenous JSON in parquet files is such a pain because of schema differences causing fields to be silently dropped. Having DuckDB solve this is exactly what I've been looking for.

jinjin2 6 hours ago

I’m mostly using Exasol these days (the concurrency and smooth scaling to multi-node is just too seductive), but with the introduction of Quack I might take another look at DuckDB. I’ll have to see how well it handles many agents reading and writing to it concurrently.

ivolimmen 5 hours ago

I am a crew member of Joy Of Coding (https://joyofcoding.org) where we invited Hannes to do a talk. He is a great speaker. Seeing this we will need to invite him another time!

aleda145 18 hours ago

Excited about a stable C++ API for extensions!

I made a dry run extension a few months ago (https://github.com/aleda145/duckdb-dryrun), will be so nice to build it just once and know that it will always work.

Also urge anyone to make an extension, the template makes it quite smooth: https://github.com/duckdb/extension-template

MILP 3 hours ago

Love DuckDB. It’s so fast and portable! I mainly use the query engine as part of my ETL process for creating SQLite database. I’d love to pitch it at work, but we’re heavily invested in BigQuery, which makes it a bit difficult.

c9cf35860db4 20 hours ago

The last year of DuckDB enhancements feel like the shift from in-process execution engine (which it is phenomenal at) to an engine that can serve as the foundation of a cloud data warehouse. I know the founders were reticent about not wanting to build that, but I have a feeling it is in the works.

jbmsf 20 hours ago

I've been using MotherDuck as a data warehouse for some time now. No regrets.

ethagnawl 20 hours ago

UPDATE: Removed uninformed comment about the relationship between DuckDB and MotherDuck.

Tomte 19 hours ago

Wait, what? I‘ve always assumed MotherDuck is the company by the main developers of DuckDB? They are unrelated?

ethagnawl 19 hours ago

jeremyjh 15 hours ago

amluto 19 hours ago

If I could have a pet feature added to DuckDB, it would be some form of native ordered table. In a database like Clickhouse or any of the dedicated time series DBMSes or log stores, there’s a built-in concept that a table might have an order, and the database will optimize based on the order. But, for databases that are logically just bags of rows (traditional DBMSes and also DuckDB [0]), you either need an index or you need to rely on full table scans or at least scans of big blocks. DuckDB does the latter really well, but I think it would be quite nice for some workflows to have explicit ordering. Also, I bet compression could work a lot better with ordering hints.

All that being said, I’m quite excited about DuckDB 2.0. I want to give the improved VARIANT support a try.

[0] Documentation on DuckDB’s native format is rather sparse AFAICT. But the DDL has nothing resembling an ordered table.

tpetry 15 hours ago

You‘re not the only one interested in this. But seems its a big change that would have to change many parts within DuckdB:

https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/discussions/8444

amluto 14 hours ago

Neat!

I’m sort of amazing that nothing in that thread mentioned ClickHouse, even just as a product that has this capability and from which one might take syntactical inspiration.

ignaciovdk 17 hours ago

Arc does pruning, and make that scan faster. Check it out: https://github.com/Basekick-Labs/arc

noodlesUK 17 hours ago

I look forward to DuckDB being the engine that underpins the next gen of analytical data tooling. DuckLake already looks amazing and with the Quack protocol seems like it will be a great natural fit for lots more types of tooling, such as sensor data etc.

dangoodmanUT 13 hours ago

It's funny to me that we still don't have incremental materialized views. All of the parts are there (export state, agg_state (forget fn name), finalize). I wonder if they're avoiding an explicit war with clickhouse or something. I do recall they mentioned they want to add this to ducklake.

Incremental MVs are ClickHouse's best feature. If DDB adds this, the last moat is distributed query execution.

hantusk 4 hours ago

It is implemented here as DuckDB extension: https://github.com/ila/openivm/

ghshephard 11 hours ago

Have you run into scenarios where a simple view doesn't accomplish what you require? I always feel like views do everything I want - because the speed is so great, the full recompute isn't that big a deal.

Maybe it's a bigger deal when you have multiple users/and or more repeated queries against something that's really expensive?

Pedro_Ribeiro 10 hours ago

I've had some use cases with low latency requirements and frequent data updates. If you want to serve data on a frontend fast it's often not feasible to recompute everything every time

mastermage 5 hours ago

I love DuckDB genuinely more than sqlite even though they do completely different things but DuckDB has like for me the perfect mix between simplicity, embedded capabilities and expressiveness. (and actual Time and Date Types).

barrrrald 14 hours ago

We've built our whole platform around DuckDB at Hex. Our product truly could not exist without it.

nikolay 14 hours ago

It's sad that almost no migration framework supports DuckDB, and overall support is highly limited, but it's a great product I've been using daily for 6 months without encountering a single issue. I hope v2 brings DuckDB more attention and increases third-party support!

rrgok 15 hours ago

Sometimes I prefer DuckDB query language to MySQL or Postgres. It is not even about performance, it just feels right. I just connect to my DBS from DuckDB just to use its query language. And besides it gives you a single language frontend.

onnimonni 14 hours ago

This! For example I tried to ask PosgreSQL to Add support for QUALIFY keyword since it makes window queries much more simpler to use. Postgres didnt want it. DuckDB maintainers are always thinking about the DX and all nice syntactic sugar.

hans_castorp 14 hours ago

The Postgres devs rejected it, because it wasn't part of the standard back then, and apparently work was going on, to include it into the standard.

Now that it's included in the standard, there is work to implement it:

https://hackorum.dev/topics/51960#message-1125429

andyferris 10 hours ago

I was curious to see they are advertising OLTP-like transactional processing speed. It would be super convenient to have one DB for OLTP and OLAP purposes!

Has anybody here tried using it that way?

(though I don't see any way to deal with write skew and other transactional guarantees - no SERIALIZABLE optimisitic concurrency, no SELECT FOR UPDATE pessimistic concurrency, etc)

anentropic 19 hours ago

Please document the new "extensible PEG-based parser" for extension authors

drannex 18 hours ago

Really looking forward to that new Async system, especially when reading/querying against thousands of parquet files. This is going to monumentally affect me and my work - I have to query against millions of massive parquet files and the speed has already been rather wonderful, but if those metrics are to be even 100% in range, this is going to make life so much better.

DuckDB is seriously an incredible utility.

luizfelberti 13 hours ago

> A repository is a name, a URL prefix, and one or more RSA public keys that are trusted to sign the extensions served from it.

Is it too late to beg Hannes and Mark to let us have something like minisign instead of RSA? :)

Very excited for 2.0, congrats folks!

logancbrown 19 hours ago

Funny to think one of my favorite software projects this decade is basically "lets make it easy to host your own OLAP database".

HawtAds 14 hours ago

How stable is DuckDB these days? I remember it was very buggy compared to Clickhouse.

est 20 hours ago

This is cool

What about the runtime size? I care this because I intend to run a stripped WASM version of DuckDB in browser.

zcw100 19 hours ago

What do you plan on stripping and what's your target? The Emscripten based build is ~10Mb. I have a component build so I'd be interesting on how you'd like to break it up.

datadrivenangel 17 hours ago

They're mostly using optional extensions for this new stuff, so the binaries are still small, like ~20mb?

d33 17 hours ago

Are there improvements in how memory_limit works? I often had DuckDB get OOM killed because it went beyond its limit. It's definitely one of the reasons why I usually have an AI tune the environment for my datasets.

thejosh 17 hours ago

I've been working on a demo database project, and have been really impressed by the UI. So glad they decided to put more effort into it, it has made building a "follow along" tutorial really nice.

ChillyCapy 15 hours ago

Great work!

I built a browser tool for querying local Parquet, CSV, JSON, Excel, Arrow, Avro, DBF, and SQLite files with DuckDB-WASM.

Most probably after DuckDB v2.0 release I will revamp my tool as well.

sv123 19 hours ago

DuckDB is so cool, game changer when it comes to local data processing.

cheema33 15 hours ago

With some of these changes, it appears to be encroaching on clickhouse territory. Or are they still very different products?

te_chris 15 hours ago

Well, I can tell you this is making me actively reconsider dropping duckdb for ch as we go from prototype to prod

encoderer 15 hours ago

Definitely encroaching.

Our last product (SaaS observability) uses Clickhouse.

Our next product (self-hosted observability) uses DuckDB.

adhamsalama 2 minutes ago

I was building an OpenTelemetry observability platform in a single executable file (in Golang) and was using ClickHouse as the database, and replaced it with an embedded DuckDB, so now it's truly a single executable file platform.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/nabatshy

orthoxerox 17 hours ago

DuckDB keeps getting better and better. I wonder when something like Apache Gluten will pick it up as a backend.

dzonga 17 hours ago

well done to the duckDB team - one of the features I'm waiting for is real time materialized views.

markhalonen 20 hours ago

Was hoping to see procedural functionality like PL/pgSQL... regardless, an astonishing project overall.

brunoborges 18 hours ago

How does DuckDB compares with PostgreSQL / MariaDB ?

tuvix 18 hours ago

DuckDB is an in-process (now I guess less so with Quack) OLAP database for analytical workloads. PostgreSQL or MariaDB are OLTP row-oriented databases that are great for application/transaction-focused workloads but are less great when you want to query across a giant amount of data.

tomjakubowski 17 hours ago

DuckDB is much like SQLite, but built for OLAP workloads: it's in-process, with a single file format on a disk, and (unlike SQLite) the data is stored in columns for better OLAP performance.

Like SQLite, concurrency options are limited compared to client-server databases like Postgres or MariaDB. DuckDB 2.0 will be adding a client-server mode with the Quack protocol which can allow for greater concurrency.

But you can also use DuckDB as a multitool to connect to and query all kinds of other data sources from one connection. Being able to pull in data from Postgres, CSVs or parquets on a file system or S3, and JSON returned by a web API, and then query across all of it in one place, can be quite handy for ad-hoc data analysis and exploration.

formerly_proven 16 hours ago

In terms of project trajectory this is also an interesting contrast. DuckDB is "SQLite, but for OLAP".

DuckDB 1.0 was in 2024. DuckDB 2.0 (new API, new storage format, new ...) is in 2026.

SQLite has been 3.x since 2004.

dartharva 17 hours ago

Would be really cool if they were to add statistical functions too. I'd jump at the chance of getting to use this over pandas

biophysboy 14 hours ago

You might know this already, but you can query pandas/polars/arrow tables directly w/ duckdb and use whatever stats packages you feel like alongside it in the same python script. I feel like they do a decent job sticking to the simpler statistical fans that make sense in sql.

dartharva 10 hours ago

Sorry, I meant duckdb-cli, not duckdb in Python.

1egg0myegg0 8 hours ago

swasheck 8 hours ago

which statistical functions do you want? i’m curious because i love duckdb and use it for a variety of projects but always want to learn more about how to use tools better.

dartharva 7 hours ago

Basic regression and interpolation for starters; perhaps some classification and outlier detection too. Disclaimer: I self-studied applied DuckDB for my job, I don't know if these already exist.

jeffbee 19 hours ago

"We reimplemented ICU" U+1F631 FACE SCREAMING IN FEAR

amluto 19 hours ago

I’m currently contemplating that MySQL apparently cannot do an INSTANT change of the collation of an unindexed column, even though, AFAICT, it has no effect whatsoever on the on-disk format or any data structure at all except for the metadata saying what the column type is.

I do not enjoy dealing with text encodings and collations in databases.

giovannibonetti 18 hours ago

Disappointed, since I was expecting they would rewrite the implementation from C++ to Zig. I bet that would increase the number of positive pull requests they get, since most developers prefer to stay away from C++ nowadays.

hnlb53nrpg 19 hours ago

Same problem, different day

badatnames 19 hours ago

Looks like an awesome release, but the smell of AI from that post is horrid.

Here is a wild idea: is it really so hard to edit out sentences structured and punctuated like this - it's so painfully obvious and distracts from the content. The effect is real.

drannex 18 hours ago

I don't really get an AI smell on this, in fact I see multiple parts that an AI would have corrected - grammatical issues, personal writing quirks, etc.

Writing similar to this: is quite a normal way of writing for technical articles - especially when you are trying to make the point clear and well organized.

ostwilkens 17 hours ago

"A major version bump is not something we do lightly, and it is not just ceremony"

For me, this sentence pops out like a sore thumb