If you need an idea for what do do with ducklake: recommend throwing all of your agent traces in it.
eddietejeda 41 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for the shoutout.
For context, we previously built custom catalogs optimized for specific use cases. But they were hard to maintain, especially as requirements changed, and Apache Iceberg was too heavy for our specific low-latency work.
Since Ducklake is only a spec, we implemented datafusion-ducklake, and it performs as well as any custom or specialized catalog we built. We use Postgres as the catalog store, and it does not get much simpler than that: a transactional database for transactional data.
Plus, it gives us a clear spec for implementing complex parts like time travel, snapshots, etc.
It's been a godsend.
We welcome and encourage contributors!
engineeringwoke 2 hours ago [-]
It's alright, it's pretty alpha software. On v1.5.4, catalog filtered counts are broken, afaik. I went to main/v2 to fix it, and then the SQL parser in duckdb v2 is 10x slower, which was another wrench in the gears. It's been a bit of a pain tbh
jauco 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, they made the spec 1.0 but it isn’t 1.0 software. Browse the bugs before use.
When it works well it’s really nice. And it beats handrolling a multi level parquet store.
engineeringwoke 57 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely. I love it, but you need a fork for now.
celias 22 hours ago [-]
Motherduck is offering a free copy of O'reilly's "DuckLake: The Definitive Guide" book on their DuckLake web page
Is this basically a table format like Delta/Iceberg but with an SQL engine built in via DuckDB?
Lucasoato 8 minutes ago [-]
Nope, from my understanding the delta log (the files that say which of your data files are actually valid or not) isn’t saved in json/parquet but directly in a database.
Much faster, but adds a dependency... that you would have added anyway with database based catalogs (that are not the only kind of catalogs)
There's a cool alternate rust/datafusion ecosystem initiative going on at https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake, and think the Quack protocol opens up a lot of cool possibilities too.
If you need an idea for what do do with ducklake: recommend throwing all of your agent traces in it.
For context, we previously built custom catalogs optimized for specific use cases. But they were hard to maintain, especially as requirements changed, and Apache Iceberg was too heavy for our specific low-latency work.
Since Ducklake is only a spec, we implemented datafusion-ducklake, and it performs as well as any custom or specialized catalog we built. We use Postgres as the catalog store, and it does not get much simpler than that: a transactional database for transactional data.
Plus, it gives us a clear spec for implementing complex parts like time travel, snapshots, etc.
It's been a godsend.
We welcome and encourage contributors!
When it works well it’s really nice. And it beats handrolling a multi level parquet store.
https://motherduck.com/product/ducklake/
Much faster, but adds a dependency... that you would have added anyway with database based catalogs (that are not the only kind of catalogs)
https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data....