Announcing DuckDB 1.4.3 LTS

In this blog post, we highlight a few important fixes in DuckDB v1.4.3, the third patch 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.

Fixes

This version ships a number of performance improvements and bugfixes.

Correctness

• #18782 Incorrect “rows affected” was reported by ART index
• #19313 Wrong result in corner case: a HAVING clause without a GROUP BY returned an incorrect result
• #19517 JOIN with a LIKE pattern resulted in columns being incorrectly included
• #19924 The optimizer incorrectly removed the ORDER BY from aggregates
• #19970 Fixed updates on indexed tables with DICT_FSST compression
• #20009 Fixed updates with DICT_FSST compression

Crashes and Internal Errors

• #19469 Potential error occurred in constraint violation message when checking foreign key constraints
• #19754 Race condition could trigger a segfault in the encryption key cache
• #20044 Fixed edge case in index deletion code path

Performance

• #18997 Macro binding had slow performance for unbalanced trees
• #19901 Memory management has been improved during WAL replay in the presence of indexes
• The vortex extension ships significant performance improvements for writing Vortex files

Miscellaneous

• #19575 Invalid Unicode error with LIKE expressions
• #19916 The default time zone of DuckDB-Wasm had an offset inverted from what it should be
• #19884 Copying to Parquet with a prepared statement did not work

Windows ARM64

With this release, we are introducing beta support for Windows ARM64 by distributing native DuckDB extensions and Python wheels.

Extension Distribution for Windows ARM64

On Windows ARM64, you can now natively install core extensions, including complex ones like spatial:

duckdb

PRAGMA platform;

┌───────────────┐
│   platform    │
│    varchar    │
├───────────────┤
│ windows_arm64 │
└───────────────┘

INSTALL spatial;
LOAD spatial;
SELECT ST_Area(ST_GeomFromText(
        'POLYGON((0 0, 4 0, 4 3, 0 3, 0 0))'
    )) AS area;

┌────────┐
│  area  │
│ double │
├────────┤
│  12.0  │
└────────┘

Python Wheel Distribution for Windows ARM64

We now distribute Python wheels for Windows ARM64. This means that you take e.g. a Copilot+ PC and run:

pip install duckdb

This installs the duckdb package using the binary distributed through PyPI.

python

Python 3.13.9 (tags/v3.13.9:8183fa5, Oct 14 2025, 14:51:39) [MSC v.1944 64 bit (ARM64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import duckdb
>>> duckdb.__version__
'1.4.3'

Currently, many Python installations that you'll find on Windows ARM64 computers use the x86_64 (AMD64) Python distribution and run through Microsoft's Prism emulator. For example, if you install Python through the Windows Store, you will get the Python AMD64 installation.

To understand which platform your Python installation is using, observe the Python CLI's first line (e.g., Python 3.13.9 ... (ARM64)).

We used the tpch extension to perform a quick benchmark by running the queries on the TPC-H SF100 dataset. We executed the benchmark on a Microsoft Copilot+ Laptop with a 12-core Snapdragon CPU running at 3.4 GHz, 64 GB RAM and 1 TB disk:

import duckdb
import os
import time

con = duckdb.connect("tpch-sf100.db")

con.execute("INSTALL tpch")
con.execute("LOAD tpch")
con.execute("CREATE OR REPLACE TABLE timings(query INTEGER, runtime DOUBLE)")

print(f"Architecture: {os.environ.get('PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE')}")

for i in range(1, 23):    
    start = time.time()
    con.execute(f"PRAGMA tpch({i})")
    duration = time.time() - start
    print(f"Q{i}: {duration:.02f}")
    con.execute(f"INSERT INTO timings VALUES ({i}, {duration})")

res = con.execute(f"""
    SELECT median(runtime)::DECIMAL(8, 2), geomean(runtime)::DECIMAL(8, 2)
    FROM timings""").fetchall()
print(f"Median runtime: {res[0][0]}")
print(f"Geomean runtime: {res[0][1]}")

The AMD64 package (running in the emulator) yielded a geometric mean runtime of 2.09 seconds, while the native ARM64 package had a geomean runtime of 1.59 seconds – a 24% performance improvement.

Conclusion

This post was a short summary of the changes in v1.4.3. As usual, you can find the full release notes on GitHub. We would like to thank our contributors for providing detailed issue reports and patches. Stay tuned for DuckDB v1.4.4 and v1.5.0, both released early next year!