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AWS Acquires DuckLabs

ducklabs.com

211–220 of 304 posts

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#211
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What queries does it accept? How does it persist data? How does it manage replication and partitioning across multiple servers? Are questions with many answers and the right one varies by application. nothing prevents to build single database which would cover all such answers. Its engineering, funding and distribution problems: no-one built it yet.

Practicality and wisdom prevent trying to fill all the database niches with a single product. Even if you did it, I'd be surprised if a single code base is optimal across the spectrum from resource constrained microcontrollers all the way up to IBM Z Series mainframes and everything in between; along with the full spectrum of persistence from in-memory MRU (or similar) caching to full two phase global consensus as we…

> microcontrollers

is a marginal niche, but everything else can be handled by one DB. You think we have PG with extensions (including duckdb) already covers most of the ground, making something like that distributed is also feasible task (there are projects), architecting system to make core engine embeddable is also feasible task.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#212
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:

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#213
Man. DuckDB is one of my favorite tools in the past decade. It basically replaced pandas/Polars for me and I hope aws leaves it alone.

Otoh, I am glad those guys got paid.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#215
post #8

I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes. Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.

What good is a foundation when it's core member is owned by a public corporation? Like we know what happens, the pattern isn't unique or rare. Corporate interests will always take priority over community interests, corporations care about profit not community. If Amazon cares about the community as they care about their own workforce, that does not bode well.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is better but it's an incredibly low bar. Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month). Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to shi…

> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month). Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this? Really no idea, just asking.

I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.

Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#217
post #33

Congrats to the founders but honestly feel bad for the team. Hearing so many not good things coming from inside AWS these days. Place sounds like a total mess. Seems like a constant stream of top talent fleeing on my LinkedIn this past year. I hope they just let the team carry on and don’t contaminate it with all the other craziness going on.

They built something amazing and now have a nice exit. The code remains open under a non profit foundation. I don't think it is that bad. If working conditions are too bad people will just quit and work for the foundation.

You make it sound like every worker agreed with this. Is this actually true or is it more about the founders exploiting their workers by selling out to one of the most devious anti-worker tech corporations?

Is profit sharing, like what you're implying, actually happening? If so, in what quantity?

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#218
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat grew on GPL licensed projects to become a $34 billion business. Canonical does the same except it’s Ubuntu not RHEL and charges more than Red Hat. You really underestimate the value of support contracts.

GPL is not MIT. If your software is GPL, you can sell it relicensed as MIT for income.

Doesn’t matter. When companies pay for support contracts they don’t care whether the code is GPL or MIT. They care about the support they get.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#219
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datafusion has all of the individual pieces, especially if you just want to data analysis, but is far from an embedded database. Indexes, transactions, a first-class storage format are all things that come included with DuckDB, that you won't have with Datafusion.

indexes are very weak in duckdb, need to fit memory.

This fall, DuckDB will support larger than memory indexes! I'm really excited about it. https://duckdb.org/2026/08/17/duckdb-20-highlights#7-storage...

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...sustainable engineering, correctness, and keeping DuckDB open and MIT-licensed for everyone Hah. Never have I ever heard a sentence that described Amazon less.

what do you mean? amazon maintains a ton of open source projects, including a pure FOSS version of Elasticsearch called Opensearch

I can’t tell if you are trolling or just oblivious.

Open search wasn’t precisely born out of the kindness of their heart and their defence of FOSS values… it’s more like a predatory practice to capture market.

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