Amazon buys DuckLabs database company
In a recent move, Amazon has purchased DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based firm responsible for the DuckDB analytical database. This acquisition ensures that Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, the creators of DuckDB and co-founders of DuckLabs, will maintain their leadership roles and guide the open-source project’s technical development within AWS.
According to the announcement, the decision to join AWS was made to bring the technology to more developers and organizations. Mühleisen and Raasveldt stated that joining AWS gives them the resources and reach to pursue ideas at a scale that would have been difficult to reach alone.
Future of DuckDB and Open-Source Projects
The parties involved in the deal have reassured the community that DuckDB and its components, such as DuckLake and Quack, will remain free and open-source under the MIT licence. The non-profit DuckDB Foundation will continue to supervise the projects.
Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, technology vice president at AWS, explained that DuckDB was created to solve the problem of fast performance for data queries. She argued that DuckDB’s optimisations and performance are particularly relevant in AI workloads that involve agents.
Community Reaction and Integration with AWS
The community has welcomed the news, although with some scepticism. On Reddit, a user expressed hope that the acquisition would not slow the pace of innovation. Andy Warfield, distinguished engineer at AWS, shared that the initial contact between AWS and DuckLabs happened when the S3 team was working on S3 Tables.
The collaboration between AWS and DuckLabs evolved over time, with the teams working closely together on various projects. Warfield stated that the deal is an opportunity to widen the co-founders’ reach rather than to absorb their work.
Following the acquisition, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is the first service to receive a user-facing feature powered by DuckDB. Esra Kayabali, principal solutions architect at AWS, explained that the new feature simplifies workloads that combine recent transactional data with historical records.
The integration of DuckDB directly in Aurora PostgreSQL allows a single query to combine live operational data with historical data available in Apache Iceberg tables managed through AWS Glue Data Catalog, as well as Parquet and Iceberg data stored in Amazon S3 and S3 Tables. This feature is available in all commercial regions and AWS GovCloud (US) at no additional charge.
