AWS buys DuckLabs, the people behind the popular in-process OLAP database

Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. The deal - the financial details of which were not disclosed - will see DuckLabs, founded by authors of the in-process OLAP database, become part of AWS. AWS said DuckDB and its related projects would remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them. Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process and, as such, there is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain. For example, the DuckDB Python package can run queries directly on data in Python software library Pandas without importing or copying data. The brainchild of academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center, DuckDB first went public in 2022 and has gathered a strong following among developers and analytics users. It achieved its 1.0 release in 2024 and has since launched into data lakes with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to get around the small changes" problem experienced by data lakes. AWS has been a fan for a while. Speaking to The Register last year, AWS veep and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield said the cloud giant's engineering team was "super excited" about the DuckLake announcement. "It was passed around broadly across the teams, and people have been playing with it. It's captured people's imaginations for sure," he said. The AWS and DuckLabs teams have already collaborated around S3 Tables, announced by AWS in December 2024, to ensure we built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB," Hannes Muhleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs told The Register on Wednesday. Although the database itself is fully open source under the MIT License, most of the contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs. However, following the merger, Muhleisen sees a greater role for the independent DuckDB Foundation in avoiding any potential conflicts of interest with other technology giants. The database can read and write to Google Sheets and query and manage Google BigQuery datasets via an extension, for example. We can expand the role of the Foundation as a place where the stakeholders or the people that are building things with DuckDB are coming together. We are thinking about adding a Technical Advisory Board to the Foundation, so that whoever is betting on DuckDB can come together in the Board and have a communication channel through the Foundation, which stays independent," Muhleisen said. The Foundation, which is led by Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, DuckLabs CTO and co-author of the database, has yet to decide the exact governance and voting rights which will determine the direction of the project's development. Nonetheless, Muhleisen said it would create a mechanism by which the community could play a greater role. In a prepared statement marking the merger, AWS's Warfield said: DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today. After about two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes and the team at DuckLabs, I'm excited at the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact. A lot of what has made DuckDB so successful is the fact that it is completely open source and easily embeddable in so many types of applications. We are committed to the project's continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation." The DuckLabs team will continue to be based in Amsterdam.(R)