Amazon Web Services has purchased DuckLabs. DuckLabs is the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
DuckLabs will become part of AWS. The company was founded by the authors of the in-process analytical database.
AWS stated that DuckDB and its related projects will remain free and open source. They will operate under their MIT licenses. The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue to guide the projects.
DuckDB is written in C++ and is embedded within a host process. This means there is no database management system server software to install, update, or maintain. For example, the DuckDB Python package can run queries directly on data in the Pandas software library without importing or copying data.
Academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center created the database. DuckDB went public in 2022 and has gathered a strong following among developers and analytics users.
The software achieved its 1.0 release in 2024. It later launched into data lakes with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to address the small changes problem experienced by data lakes.
AWS has expressed enthusiasm for the project previously. Speaking to The Register last year, AWS vice president and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield said the cloud giant engineering team was super excited about the DuckLake announcement. He noted that it was passed around broadly across teams and captured people imaginations.
The AWS and DuckLabs teams have already collaborated around S3 Tables, which AWS announced in December 2024. Hannes Muehleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs, told The Register that they built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB.
Although the database is fully open source under the MIT License, most contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs. Following the merger, Muehleisen sees a greater role for the independent DuckDB Foundation in avoiding 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.
Muehleisen stated that the role of the Foundation can expand as a place where stakeholders and people building things with DuckDB come together. They are thinking about adding a Technical Advisory Board to the Foundation. This would allow anyone betting on DuckDB to communicate through the independent Foundation.
The Foundation is led by Muehleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who serves as DuckLabs CTO and co-author of the database. The exact governance and voting rights that will determine the direction of project development have not yet been decided. Muehleisen noted that it would create a mechanism for the community to play a greater role.
In a prepared statement, AWS vice president Andy Warfield praised the project. He called DuckDB an incredible open source project with an amazing community that is broadly used and loved by S3 customers. Warfield noted that after two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes, and the DuckLabs team, he is excited to help the project have a broader impact. He emphasized the company commitment to the project continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation.
