AWS Acquires DuckDB

(ducklabs.com)

154 points | by onderkalaci 30 minutes ago

16 comments

  • hobofan 17 minutes 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 8 minutes ago
      Surely they are better than Google in this regard.
      • hobofan 2 minutes 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.

    • ferguess_k 8 minutes ago
      Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
  • pepperoni_pizza 19 minutes ago
    Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
    • echelon 3 minutes ago
      If there's no price tag mentioned, it's likely not generational wealth.
  • fidotron 17 minutes ago
    Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?
  • karakanb 4 minutes 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.
  • tormeh 4 minutes 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.

  • puszczyk 4 minutes ago
    What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?
    • tiffanyh 2 minutes 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.

  • schmuhblaster 9 minutes ago
    I've been super impressed by DuckDB ever since first trying it out about 3 three years ago. Congrats to the founders!
  • yipinwong 16 minutes 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 4 minutes ago
      like vector search ?
  • ferguess_k 18 minutes 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.

  • newtwentysix 17 minutes ago
    super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.
    • eventualcomp 10 minutes 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 7 minutes 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?
    • grim_io 10 minutes ago
      Complete control over what gets merged and worked on by the core team.
      • orian 8 minutes 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
  • meerita 9 minutes ago
    I am glad for them. Does anyone know the amount of the operation?
  • tosh 20 minutes ago
    did not expect that

    I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright

  • Bluestein 5 minutes ago
    Extend, embrace, quack.-
  • m1keil 11 minutes ago
    Waiting for QuackDB the OSS spin off any second now
  • add-sub-mul-div 20 minutes ago
    We just can't have nice things, can we?
    • systems 8 minutes 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)
    • grim_io 8 minutes ago
      Buying nice things should not be underestimated :)
  • aleda145 16 minutes ago
    [dead]