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AWS Acquires DuckLabs

ducklabs.com

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Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#311

Post by cmiles8 »

rklaehn wrote: post #112
cmiles8 wrote: 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.

While the full details aren’t publicly known these sort of “exits” are generally not home runs for most team members. They’ll get some payout but hardly life changing and will get absorbed into BigCo still needing to find a new job if they don’t stay on.

These kind of arrangements generally get the investors their money back plus a modest return. The employees generally don’t get much, relative to the risk they took.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#313

Post by domper »

Fervicus wrote: post #272
phainopepla2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DuckDB is for analytics, so OLAP instead of OLTP. If you're using the DB for normal transactions, stick with sqlite

Thanks, I gathered that much. I am curious what kind of stuff people are using it for, especially in their personal projects.

One great use case I've found:

You can find monthly archives of every reddit comment on Academic torrents. These are huge NDJSON files compressed to .zst, named like 'RC_2026-01.zst'. The size is ~60GB compressed, 350GB+ uncompressed, per month.

Most of the size is taken by the actual comment text. But I was only interested in calculating how many unique commenters subreddits have in a month so I only wanted to extract a few fields from it and discard the rest.

If you use traditional tools like pandas or load the data to a database and then query it, you would quickly run out of RAM or storage space, especially when doing it on a basic laptop like I was. But with DuckDB it's just this:

``` SELECT lower(subreddit) AS subreddit, author FROM read_json(['RC_2026-01.zst', 'RC_2026-02.zst']) ```

DuckDB automatically handles decompression on the fly, figures out the schema, manages RAM so you won't OOM and so on. And even on my laptop that query takes like, 2 minutes? Which is super impressive to me.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#314

Post by nostrebored »

voiceeh wrote: post #284
nostrebored wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS in large pockets was not a mess 10 years ago. The things I hear from recent AWS departures are very concerning.

I left AWS recently, but I don't think the entire place is a mess. It really depends on the team. On my team we were expected to work 90+ hours a week, and were told we were slackers if we were unwilling to work Sunday afternoons. But I've heard from others that some teams are a lot better.

Many Amazon teams have had high expectations for work. The stories I’ve heard have largely been around how AI is used, slipping CR standards, and what is funded.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#315

Post by 4petesake »

fullstop wrote: post #19
hobofan wrote: 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.

One of the things that has hampered the adoption of Dart/Flutter has been the fear Google would abandon it. I always presumed them to be in the lead regarding this kind of shittiness, but this is based on gut feel rather than analysis.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#316

Post by chotmat »

batdata wrote: post #44
puszczyk wrote: post #26

What's the relationship between MotherDuck ( https://motherduck.com ) and DuckLabs?

Hey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/

Wait, you guys actually call yourselves MotherDuckers :rofl:. I was thinking before that would be a hilarious name, kind of like how Google has “Googlers.”

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#317

Post by Gh0stRAT »

dofm wrote: post #295
hitekker wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's odd; I've only heard good things about the Java team at Oracle. Is there a public article or insider knowledge that differs?

I mean this more generally, beyond that team. Oracle have used their ownership of Java as a thumping great cudgel before, and my own feeling is that the Google lawsuit basically ended Java’s appeal as a language on which others would risk any kind of innovation. A more nuanced approach might have preserved its relevance.

A few years ago, I was itching to either brush up on Java (which I hadn't used since around v1.8) or learn a new one. (eg Golang, Rust, etc) In light of Oracle owning Java, I suspected it would face a long, slow decline and would eventually fade into Perl-like obscurity and decided to spend my time elsewhere. Also, I didn't want their nagging runtime updater on my system anymore.

Haven't regretted that decision at all and it seems to be playing out about how I expected. (Except LLMs make rewrites into other languages more tractable so the slow decline of Java may accelerate)

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#318

Post by opem »

Huge moment for the people behind duckdb. I've been using duckdb since the days of its preview releases and I knew they were gonna make it big. So, this one is well deserved. I hope duckdb's governance continues to stay under duckdb foundation.

Re: AWS Acquires DuckLabs

#319

Post by opem »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #232
hobofan wrote: 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.

It would have been a perfect story/stack if they'd have rather joined duckduckgo ;)
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