Announcing DuckDB 1.4.1 LTS

In this blog post, we highlight a few important fixes and convenience improvements in DuckDB v1.4.1, the first bugfix release in DuckDB's 1.4 LTS line. You can find the complete release notes on GitHub.

To install the new version, please visit the installation page.

Iceberg Improvements

The DuckDB iceberg extension received a number of patches:

• You can now attach to an Iceberg REST Catalog and specify an access delegation mode. This fixes a bug when using catalogs that did not vend credentials. The ATTACH statement will now look like this:

  ATTACH 'warehouse_name' AS my_datalake (
      TYPE iceberg,
      ENDPOINT 'endpoint',
      ACCESS_DELEGATION_MODE 'delegation_mode_option',
      SECRET 'my_secret'
  );
  

  The current ACCESS_DELEGATION_MODE options are vended_credentials (default) and none.

• When attaching to AWS-managed REST Catalogs, the http_timeout setting is now respected.
• Attempting to rename or replace a table within a transaction now throws a clear error message.
• AWS Athena can now read Iceberg tables written by DuckDB.

AWS Improvements

The aws extension received a number of changes, which makes it easier to configure and troubleshoot. See the aws documentation page for more details.

Secret Validation

Since DuckDB v1.4.0, the AWS credential_chain provider looks for any required credentials during CREATE SECRET time, failing if absent/unavailable. Since v1.4.1 this behavior can also be configured via the VALIDATION option as follows:

CREATE OR REPLACE SECRET secret (
    TYPE s3,
    PROVIDER credential_chain,
    VALIDATION 'exists'
);

Two validation modes are supported:

• exists (default) requires present credentials.
• none allows CREATE SECRET to succeed for credential_chains with no available credentials.

S3 Default Region

Previously, setting the S3 region incorrectly could result in difficult-to-debug situations (Unknown error for HTTP HEAD to ...).

DuckDB v1.4.1 removes us-east-1 as the default S3 region and returns a 301 error code if an incorrect region is used.

Fixes for Missing Data

Users reported two cases where DuckDB omitted some data:

• The Parquet reader had a regression which caused it to omit some rows when using predicate pushdown on certain string columns.
• In certain edge cases, DuckDB’s ART index could omit rows rows non-deterministically when running on multiple threads. Note that this index is only used when you manually specify an index with CREATE INDEX.

DuckDB v1.4.1 fixes both of these issues.

Autoloading

In DuckDB v1.4.0, the httpfs extension was not always autoloaded. For example, running:

COPY (SELECT 42 AS answer) TO 's3://my_bucket/my_file.parquet';

without loading httpfs manually returned the following error:

Cannot open file "s3://my_bucket/my_file.parquet": No such file or directory

With v1.4.1, autoloading works and DuckDB can write to the bucket right away.

Docker Image

We now officially distribute a Docker image, making it easy to run DuckDB in a containerized environment:

docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd):/workspace" -w /workspace duckdb/duckdb

DuckDB v1.4.1 (Andium) b390a7c376
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
Connected to a transient in-memory database.
Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database.
D

For more details including operational considerations and using the UI, read the Docker image page.