A Preview of DuckDB v2.0

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... reply: 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....

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! reply: 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?

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flowDuckDB has been a fantastic engine to build on (in python), and processes thousands of events per second, day in an day out, without issue

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? reply: 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/23605If every Ctrl+S is a commit, it'll go up fast."woops"!

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

If you like DuckDB, please consider funding DB research [1]![1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336147

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. reply: 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

> 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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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