AWS buys DuckLabs, the people behind the popular in-process OLAP database

Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB.

The deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — will see DuckLabs, founded by authors of the in-process OLAP database, become part of AWS.

AWS said DuckDB and its related projects would remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them.

Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process and, as such, there is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain.

For example, the DuckDB Python package can run queries directly on data in Python software library Pandas without importing or copying data.

The brainchild of academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center, DuckDB first went public in 2022 and has gathered a strong following among developers and analytics users.

It achieved its 1.0 release in 2024 and has since launched into data lakes with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to get around the “small changes” problem experienced by data lakes.

AWS has been a fan for a while.

Speaking to The Register last year, AWS veep and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield said the cloud giant's engineering team was "super excited" about the DuckLake announcement.

"It was passed around broadly across the teams, and people have been playing with it.

It's captured people's imaginations for sure," he said.

The AWS and DuckLabs teams have already collaborated around S3 Tables, announced by AWS in December 2024, to ensure “we built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB,” Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs told The Register on Wednesday.

Although the database itself is fully open source under the MIT License, most of the contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs.

However, following the merger, Mühleisen sees a greater role for the independent DuckDB Foundation in avoiding any potential conflicts of interest with other technology giants.