Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason it's good is because, although it is bad, you never have to worry about it in terms of maintenance, admin or scale. It's like lambda for databases. For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
They should really call it "data-structures as a service" rather than a database, really. Programming against it always reminds me of Leetcode problems, having to define your columns in a way to suit the very specific lookup patterns that they allow for.
AWS Acquires DuckLabs
261–270 of 293 posts
Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#262I'm an idiot, and a lot of Hacker News goes over my head, but I still read it. Would anyone mind answering this question? Are databases not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different databases? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?
It's a fair question! My attempt at an answer: no, databases are not solved. Specifically, different databases are better or worse for different use-cases. For example, Postgres is a great "all around database" - you can use it for a lot of different things. As a "relational" database, it's really good if you have a table full of users, a table full of order, and you want to see all orders made by a user with ID=123.…
Check this curated list of databases from Carnegie Mellon University: https://dbdb.io/
Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#263Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#264I'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.
Well ...
Either way that news is awful. Europeans selling out to US corporations and then wondering why Europe is not competitive in software engineering anymore. Funniest thing is Draghi keeps on saying that; well, recently we also heard that the USA has full access to all national police databases in the EU now. It seems as if Washington remote-proxy-controls the EU. Quite amazing to see, too. The amount of bribe money flowing must be legendary.
Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
what do you mean? amazon maintains a ton of open source projects, including a pure FOSS version of Elasticsearch called Opensearch
Top-level troll: that's not a "version" of Elastic Search, it's a fork of ES specifically created due to ES's licence change that made it more difficult for AWS to extract money from it at Elastic's expense. Not that I like either actor in this particular play, but this isn't exactly an example of community oriented goodwill on Amazon's part.
Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#266AWS 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
#267DuckLabs will be an AWS subsidiary, not subsumed into AWS itself.
Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#269Why do we need a source distribution for a well regarded MIT licensed project? Because it's not easy to contribute code to DuckDB if you don't work at DuckLabs. The CI used to take 5 hours for a simple bug fix last I looked (may have improved since I flagged it on social media).
There are two that I'm aware of:
* Haybarn: https://rusty.today/blog/duckdb-extension-distribution-gap/
* Pygmy-Goose: https://github.com/Pygmy-Goose/pygmy-goose
Pygmy-Goose is focused on making agentic workflows faster by splitting the repo, making git worktrees cheap and 5 minute cached CI on 3 major platforms.Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs
#270Congrats 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.
Buying the team and having them all quit is such a bad outcome for AWS, especially they would not keep any of the IP, which is owned by the DuckDB Foundation. I don't think they would be that short-sighted.