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AWS Acquires DuckLabs

ducklabs.com

251–260 of 294 posts

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.

They have published 2 academic papers about it. What more do you want, operational details?

For example, I would like to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export before I run one.

One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#252

AWS is a great home for DuckLabs. They just want people to use more compute and storage, so they have a degree of technology-neutrality. This is the key to allowing DuckDB to continue to grow in whatever directions are natural, rather than being warped by some kind of walled garden data platform strategy.

Fair point, but no one is clearly articulating what AWS gets out of this. They don't get the DuckDB IP, that's owned by the foundation. All the work that the team at DuckLabs is putting in growing DuckDB and DuckLake are already in principle converting into compute/storage demand in AWS. So what does AWS actually want and how will it change DuckDB to accomplish it?

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would agree that they very much had business decisions around the fork - but calling them malicious is bizarre.

They used the software in a way that complied with the license. When the license changed to no longer suit them for future releases, they forked from the original license.

Remove the names here, and in context, every single person familiar with open source projects and licensing would think this is a nonissue. They used the software as the license was intended, and exercised the rights given to them by that license. That freedom to fork if they don't like where the project is going, or things change and the project is no longer viable for them with the new license, is one of the key freedoms enshrined in the whole FOSS movement.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important distinction, I hope the title can be changed. I was really surprised when I first came across DuckDB at how good at it is for its target use cases. It is a game changer for me for the "local analytics" space, and its ability to scale up to a large degree helps a lot. It is simply awesome to be able to point DuckDB at a mess of CSV and other files and have an instant database on top of it that I c…

It’s faster than trino and spark for 99% of your use cases. Only once the datasets reach the 100GiB to TiB range is trino/spark faster. Compute is scaling vertically faster than Data Eng/Analytics dataset growth, over time DuckDB will be the better choice.

No way spark is faster at 100 GB!

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#256
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.

An exit can be a nice payout, but only retirement level payouts for a very few. Most will need to find a new job and the market is pretty shit right now and I doubt the foundation has the funds to hire the entire team back.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#257
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.

I think 'least regard' belongs to Oracle. For some reason I thought DuckDB was one of Gabe's ideas over at DuckDuckGo :-). That said, the acquisition by Amazon is interesting in that it seems to overlap with their existing DB offerings? Which makes me wonder what exactly it is that they are getting out of this.

they did fairly well with Java

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#258
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.

Surely they are better than Google in this regard.

golang is great?

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#259

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.

LLM to write it, then all the managers just use LLM to summarise it :)

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#260
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much doubt it’s generational wealth. I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare. My guess is that Amazon wants official hosted versions and doesn’t want to go through something like the Redis fiasco with licensing. In that case, they ended up having to support their own development anyway (with Valkey), so they might as well just…

How much do you really need for generational wealth? In my opinion, if you're more than 10 years away from retirement and received a surprise $1 million, you're setup for the rest of your life and your children as well assuming they don't immediately blow it all when you die (that's what a good trust should be for). Assuming historical returns, your money doubles roughly every 7 years, so within the rest of your life…

$1M is a newly built condo in the East Bay with HOA >$800/month. Not even an 80 year old 1,300 sqft house in the same area.
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