Amazon has acquired DuckLabs, the company behind the in-process analytical database DuckDB, and brought its founders into AWS. Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the project’s technical direction, while DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and the rest of the “Duck Stack” are set to remain open source under the MIT license.
The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue overseeing the projects. That structure matters because developers commonly embed DuckDB directly in applications and analytical tools rather than access it as a conventional remote database. Community reaction has mixed enthusiasm about added resources with concern that an acquisition could affect the project’s pace or priorities.
AWS has already introduced a user-facing integration in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. It allows one query to combine current operational data in Aurora with historical Parquet or Iceberg data stored in Amazon S3 and cataloged through AWS Glue. Previously, teams often copied such data through reverse ETL pipelines, adding synchronization work and infrastructure costs.
AWS says the processing stays within Aurora, avoiding additional network hops. The capability is available in commercial AWS regions and GovCloud at no added feature charge, although customers still pay for extra Aurora compute and S3 requests. The open-source commitments are explicit; their durability will depend on governance after the acquisition.