AWS Acquires DuckLabs

Posted by onderkalaci 16 hours ago

1010 points | 298 commentspage 2

fidotron 16 hours ago|

Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?

skeeter2020 13 hours ago||

That seems unlikely because AWS needs to build proprietary features within their services to lock in paying (enterprise) users. The problem now is that labs will inevitably focus on this work, which I view as opposed to local, in-process when your paycheque comes from selling hosted services.

bornfreddy 12 hours ago||

And forced AWS to acquire them instead? Nice trick.

adeptima 5 hours ago||

If you are into geo spatial, worth to check on the same class project - SedonaDB https://github.com/apache/sedona-db

"SedonaDB is an open-source single-node analytical database engine with geospatial as a first-class citizen"

Apache License 2.0 https://github.com/apache/sedona-db/blob/main/LICENSE

MIT License https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/blob/main/LICENSE

https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/spatial/func...

puszczyk 16 hours ago||

What's the relationship between MotherDuck (https://motherduck.com) and DuckLabs?

batdata 16 hours ago||

Hey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/

chotmat 49 minutes ago||

Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”

tiffanyh 16 hours 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.

pepperoni_pizza 16 hours ago||

You're right - MotherDuck just got Jeffed.

skeeter2020 13 hours ago||

TL;DR AWS will either acquire MD next/soon, or (more likely) keep them around for the optics that they are totally not going to starve the community of anything other than DuckDB as a hosted AWS service.

From the MD "about page":

The idea for MotherDuck came after Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck co-founder and chief duck-herder, saw DuckDB in action and thought, “Wow, this is amazing! someone should really build a serverless version.”

...

Hannes and Mark, who founded DuckLabs to focus on the core technology and build the world’s best analytics database, were looking for partners who would build a commercial cloud offering.

log101 16 hours ago||

1 month later: "Re-writing DuckDB in Rust with Claude Ultra". There is a curios phenomenon, big tech uses great open source projects as a guinea pig for experimenting agent-based development approaches, see Bun, AstroJS.

dunefox 13 hours ago|

Wouldn't be the worst thing, when I last used it, I got some c++ specific errors.

ferguess_k 16 hours 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.

jakozaur 15 hours ago||

AWS rarely acquired startups, though leveraging someone else's tech is a typical pattern. It did license ParAccel and sold it as Redshift. It also runs Athena, which is based on Trino (a Presto fork).

Now, with Snowflake and Databricks earning big bucks in the intelligence era, time to gain market share by having DuckLabs under its ownership?

senderista 14 hours ago||

Also repackaged Blazegraph as Neptune (the original project was shut down after acquisition).

jefecoon 12 hours ago||

Any indication yet as to whether Quack, DuckLake, real-time materialized views dev will continue full-steam ahead? B/c myself and i know of many others very interested in seeing these efforts completed... :crossed-fingers:

karakanb 16 hours 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.

smithclay 13 hours ago||

Feel like AWS got a lot of the concepts right with S3 Tables* ("serverless" Iceberg catalog on top of S3) ... would love, love to see a version of S3 Tables that lets you choose between Ducklake or Iceberg as the catalog.

* Cloudflare also seems to have gotten the same idea right with R2 Data Catalog

pepperoni_pizza 14 hours ago|||

Athena already has Trino and Spark engines, it could totally have DuckDB one too.

nicornk 16 hours ago||

This would be my bet and hope as well.

otterley 9 hours ago||

More details on the acquisition here: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/08/duckdb-and-the-...

DuckLabs will be an AWS subsidiary, not subsumed into AWS itself.

wqtz 13 hours ago|

I made a prediction that motherduck will be acquired by GCP. But I could not imagine duckdb labs will be acquired by AWS. I do not think of AWS as a serious contender in the data space. So, we have now Pola.rs and motherduck in the market. Who will acquire them? I believe Microsoft has brought in a fair few industry talent to build their Azure Fabric product. Then you also have AI companies that are buying devtool/utility companies left and right.

More comments...