Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind DuckDB, an open-source, in-process analytical database often described as “SQLite for analytics.” The core team behind DuckDB will join AWS, but DuckDB itself will stay independent and open source.
The acquisition closed on August 31, following the deal’s announcement on August 26, with the DuckLabs team officially joining AWS on September 1.
Crucially, the transaction does not include ownership of the DuckDB open-source project, which remains under the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation and continues to be distributed under the MIT license. DuckLake, Quack, and other open-source parts of the Duck Stack will also remain open source.
DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who also started DuckLabs, are joining AWS along with the rest of the 30-person team in Amsterdam. They will keep working on DuckDB and leading its technical direction.
Current DuckDB users will not see any immediate changes. AWS says the database will still be developed as an independent open-source project, and the DuckLabs team will keep working on it together.
DuckLabs says they joined AWS mainly because DuckDB is growing quickly. The project now gets over one million downloads each day, and the company felt its small size could become a problem as more people use DuckDB.
The two companies have also worked together for about two years. Now, they plan to combine DuckLabs’ database skills with AWS’s infrastructure and global reach.
Among the longer-term goals is using DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack as building blocks for a new generation of AWS data and analytics services. AWS says the combination should help make its analytics offerings faster, simpler, and more cost-effective.
Some changes are also planned for DuckDB’s open-source community. The DuckDB Foundation plans to set up a technical advisory board so key community members can have a bigger say in the project’s technical direction.
DuckLabs also plans to open up DuckDB’s extension system. This will let extensions from third-party developers and organizations run in the database, growing the ecosystem beyond just the extensions provided by the project itself.
