DuckDB

Last week @ducklabs.com released DuckDB 2.0, our biggest feature release so far. In this blog post, @szarnyasg.org and Geertjan Wielenga highlight a few of the hidden gems of #DuckDB 2.0 – smaller features and improvements which are still valuable – that didn’t make the main release announcement:

What would SQL be without recursive common table expressions (CTE)? Correct: nothing but glorified relational algebra. Recursive CTEs (and myself 😉) are on stage during the upcoming codetalks.com 2026 conference in Hamburg. Contains lots of funky SQL examples (all runnable in @duckdb.org).

DuckDB 2.0 is out as of yesterday! Many contributors have already migrated their Community Extensions, with more on the way. To track the transition, each extension now has a compatibility matrix across platforms and DuckDB versions. For example, see DuckPGQ's matrix at duckdb.org/community_ex...

Announcing DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal” 🦆 This is the biggest #DuckDB feature release ever, and it's shipping a polished version of the Quack protocol for DuckDB-as-a-server, async I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, agent mode, triggers, an extensible SQL parser and more – read on for details.

DuckDB 2.0 is coming tomorrow!

DuckDB’s `read_json` turns JSON files into tables. It reads through part of the data to work out a schema, then gives you typed columns. In this blog post, we infer a schema from such a column, adjust it, and turn the column into typed columns, without first writing the data to a file – all in SQL.

If you're using the DuckDB Python client and planning to upgrade to v2.0, we baked a fresh nightly build for you! You can give it a try with: pip install duckdb --pre --upgrade If you find any issues, let us know on GitHub!

What’s Inside an Iceberg Table? 🧊 📦 An #ApacheIceberg table looks like a regular table when you query it, but beneath the surface…it’s like an iceberg. 😅 With #DuckDB, you can inspect every layer with plain SQL. In this post, we create a small Iceberg table and walk through it from the top down:

We are proud to sponsor CIDR, the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, for the next 5 years. And every other year, CIDR is hosted in our hometown of Amsterdam, so we hope to see you around! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2027/org...

Using DuckDB to effortlessly modernize your legacy 🦆🧓🏽 In this talk from DuckCon, Nicolas Renkamp from Merck shares how the team used SQLFrame to migrate from #PySpark to #DuckDB without any code changes. Video below or slides here: blobs.duckdb.org/events/duckc...

#DuckDB is already a solid building block for fast and reliable agentic applications. And it’s getting even better with a dedicated ‘agent mode’ coming in DuckDB 2.0. 🐣🤖👍

The #DuckDB v2.0 CLI has an agent mode that gets AI coding agents to a correct result faster and with fewer tokens. When the CLI detects an agent, it prints compact Markdown tables instead of padded boxes, says clearly when a result was cut, stops runaway queries early, and reports errors as JSON.

A #DuckDB file doesn't have to contain any data. It can store nothing but view definitions pointing at files stored somewhere else, such as Parquet on object storage. The file stays a few hundred KBs no matter how large the data it describes. In this post, we create such a small shareable catalog:

[Guest blog:] When the analytics screen running on our main operational database got too slow, we moved 1 year of data into #DuckDB on the same server. Getting the data in was the hard part. This is the story of every method we tried and why a table function written in Java is the one we shipped:

Grouping on repeated strings is expensive. 💰 By moving strings into a small dimension table with sorted, narrow integer keys, #DuckDB can aggregate on fixed-width integers and keep its hash tables compact. Here’s how to achieve faster string aggregations with dimension tables:

Missed this originally, but: jev + @duckdb.org ! duckdb.org/2026/09/29/jev

🦆 Working with RDF in DuckDB (@duckdb.org)? duck_rdf 2.8.3 is out with SPARQL enhancements, Turtle/quads export fixes, and performance improvements. Read, write, and query RDF alongside your SQL workflows. Release notes: github.com/nonodename/d... #KnowledgeGraphs #DuckDB

🦆 DuckDB v2.0.0 ships in a few weeks. Here's an accurate depiction of our CI pipeline building the v2.0.0-dev clients. 🙌 Help us craft a great release by trying out the preview release and reporting any issues that you encounter. duckdb.org/install/?ver...

DuckDB as an analytical runtime 📊 🦆 What if a DuckDB file could contain an entire analytics workspace? In this talk from DuckCon, Ilya Boyandin from Foursquare / GeoVisually GmbH presents on building local-first analytics apps with SQLRooms and #DuckDB.

Jev & DuckDB: Plain-English Conditions in SQL 😎 🦆 Jev is a model that answers with a typed value and a probability instead of a paragraph. A number of DuckDB + Jev community extensions have been published that let you filter, classify, and score DuckDB rows with plain-English conditions. More:

Announcing DuckDB 1.5.6 🦆 🦆 This is the sixth patch release in DuckDB’s 1.5 (Variegata) line. The release ships bugfixes, performance improvements, and security patches. Find the full release notes on GitHub⁠ or browse the overview here:

I've been playing with @duckdb.org and I gotta say the docs are amazing. The built-in web shell is a really nice touch. You can play with DuckDB right inside your web browser. This might be my SQLite replacement. duckdb.org/docs/current

Did you know that, since #DuckDB v0.10.3 (~May 2024), you can point a SELECT at a dataset on the Hugging Face Hub⁠, using the DuckDB `hf://` protocol, and query it, without downloading it first? 🤗 🦆 This blog post covers how that Hugging Face + DuckDB integration works and the use cases it fits:

[ICYMI:] Why SQL Won 🏁 In this interview with Let's Data Science, #DuckDB co-creator @hannes.muehleisen.org argues that the data industry misdiagnosed SQL’s problems a decade ago. What developers *actually* hated in 2013 was the install, the server and the client protocol, not the language itself:

DuckDB Now Ships inside dbt v2 🦆 📦 In this blog post, Geertjan Wielenga walks you through how to set up dbt v2, DuckLake and Iceberg catalogs, querying dbt’s Parquet metadata with DuckDB, plus other v2 features that matter to DuckDB users, including migrating to dbt v2. Dive in here:

Attending the Rows & Columns Summit in San Francisco today? *THE* @hannes.muehleisen.org, co-creator of #DuckDB, will give a talk on “Nobody Knows What OLTP Is: DuckDB Moves to the Middle” at 1:30 p.m. (today, Sept 22nd) We hope to see you there! 🦆 🦆 Sassy abstract and more info here:

Grep your lakehouse: Search-first retrieval for DuckDB-powered agents 🦆 😎 In this DuckCon talk, Sylvain Utard at Altertable presents on bringing full-text and semantic search to DuckLake to increase agent effectiveness. Watch the vid below or lurk the slides here: blobs.duckdb.org/events/duckc...

When DuckDB-Wasm was launched in 2021, databases couldn't be persisted: everything lived in the Wasm heap and vanished when the tab closed. Now, DuckDB-Wasm can use the Origin Private File System (OPFS) in modern browsers as a storage backend. @carlo.piovesan.io & Geertjan Wielenga show you how:

Are you attending #dbtSummit in Las Vegas? 😎 Don’t miss @hannes.muehleisen.org deliver his talk “dbt Without the Warehouse (or the Bill): DuckDB End to End” Hannes’s talk starts at 10:00 a.m. PT on Friday, Sept 18th – on Level 3, Gracia 4. Don’t miss it! And say hi to Hannes if you stop by!

DuckDB Skills for Claude Code The `duckdb-skills` plugin gives Claude Code a growing number of skills that use the DuckDB CLI to read data files, run queries, convert formats, explore object storage, search the docs, and recall earlier sessions. Here's how it works (and how you can get started):

DuckLake: The Lakehouse That's Just SQL & Parquet In this episode of @talkpython.fm , host @mkennedy.codes talks with Pedro Holanda and Guillermo Sanchez Dionis from @ducklabs.com about the unique – and powerful – architecture of #DuckLake from top to bottom. Watch/listen to the episode here:

after all the attention for duckdb's acquisition by AWS: one of my favorite things is their "why @duckdb.org" page — duckdb.org/why_duckdb explainining their tradeoffs and goals; and how they try to achieve those through technical means

🐣 DuckDB v2.0 is around the corner! We started publishing alpha releases and encourage our community to give them a go. If you encounter any issues, we're more than happy to fix them before the release in October. duckdb.org/2026/09/02/t...

AWS: DuckDB will provide 'connective tissue' across the data estate

[v2.0 preview:] #DuckDB’s recursive CTE engine now treats recursion as 1 long-lived computation: it retains eligible epoch-invariant state, chooses execution modes from exact frontier cardinalities and physical work, probes keyed state directly and gives `USING KEY ... UNION` changed-key semantics.

We hope you’ll join us for the DuckDB #Boston meetup on Sept 3rd starting at 5:30 pm happening at W Boston hotel (100 Stuart St). Meet other #DuckDB devs, learn from the technical talks, and enjoy some drinks & snacks! 🦆 🦆 🦆 Admission free, registration required, full agenda below. Who’s coming?

What’s Next for DuckDB? 🦆 🤔 @hannes.muehleisen.org, co-creator of #DuckDB, was recently interviewed by @krisajenkins.bsky.social of the Developer Voices podcast on every challenge, reward, twist and turn of building a database as popular as DuckDB -- including a big acquisition. Watch or read:

Some big news: @ducklabs.com is joining AWS, with the move expected to complete by early September. Our team will stay together in Amsterdam, with more resources to take DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack further - while the open-source Duck Stack remains free under MIT license ducklabs.com/news/2026/08...

.@ducklabs.com is joining Amazon Web Services (AWS), expected to be effective by early Sept. This move gives DuckLabs the resources and reach to bring #DuckDB, DuckLake, and the Quack protocol to many more developers and orgs – while keeping our commitment to OSS Read the full announcement here:

DuckDB Table Functions in Java 🦆 ☕ The DuckDB #Java client registers table functions written in pure Java, exposing any Java-accessible data source as a SQL table. That turns #DuckDB into a single-node query engine for heterogeneous joins across remote systems and local files, with no export step.

Here’s your chance to meet fellow DuckDB devs in person! Join us for the @duckdb.org Boston meetup on Sept 3rd starting at 5:30 p.m. Enjoy some drinks and snacks, meet other DuckDB users, and learn from the technical talks. Admission is free, but registration is required. Will we see you there? 🦆🦆

`Chunked Query Results in the DuckDB Java Driver` 🦆 ☕ The DuckDB #Java driver can now return query results as data chunks, avoiding JDBC’s one-row-at-a-time ResultSet. #DuckDB is a columnar, vectorized database. JDBC was designed in 1997. Here’s how the new DuckDB Java driver bridges the two:

Your database deserves a better parser (Don’t worry, #DuckDB v2.0 is giving you one) 🦆 🦆 Read more from @dtenwolde.bsky.social on how DuckDB v2.0 replaces its Postgres-derived SQL parser with a PEG-based parser that is easier to evolve and can be extended at runtime:

It’s time for a tale: Woo-oo! 🦆 🦆 🦆 🎵 🎶 The story of DuckDB is about more than just a database, but also the community around it. From our humble beginnings in 2018 🐣 to the preview announcement of DuckDB v2.0 and beyond 🦆⚡ – here’s the complete Duck tale from start to finish:

(🦆🦆!) DuckDB v2.0 will ship #JSON functions that allow you to easily apply JSON patches. #DuckDB ’s JSON extension already covers reading JSON, extracting paths, applying RFC 7396 merge patches, and the usual scalar accessors. Read more in this post by Mustafa Khan: duckdb.org/2026/08/18/r...