Try DuckDB v2.0-alpha
TL;DR: DuckDB's development team in Amsterdam has started getting DuckDB v2.0 ready for release in October. If you like shiny new things, try out the alpha releases now and report anything that might not be working as expected!
The State of DuckDB v2.0
A few weeks ago, we published a preview of DuckDB v2.0.
Today, we branched off v2.0-cyanoptera from the main development branch in the duckdb/duckdb repository. This marks a feature freeze – in the coming weeks, development work will focus on testing, bugfixing and iterating toward the best DuckDB release to date: v2.0 Cyanoptera, projected for the second half of October.
The DuckDB ecosystem has duckdb/duckdb at its center: it's a dependency for most other work, so stabilizing it unlocks work across the other repositories. There are two main directions: clients and extensions.
Clients
On the client side, the Python and CLI clients are already available as alpha versions. To install the command-line client on Linux or macOS, run:
curl https://install.duckdb.org | DUCKDB_VERSION=alpha sh
~/.duckdb/cli/latest/duckdb -c "SELECT version() AS version;"
┌───────────────────┐
│ version │
│ varchar │
├───────────────────┤
│ v2.0.0-alpha39764 │
└───────────────────┘
To install the Python client, run:
pip install duckdb --pre --upgrade
python3 -c "import duckdb; print(duckdb.version())"
This prints the versions of both the Python client (currently 1.6-dev) and the underlying DuckDB library (2.0.0-alpha):
1.6.0.dev365 (with duckdb 2.0.0-alpha38615)
We'll gradually add other clients to this list. Each new client that moves to 2.0 improves coverage for the DuckDB project, given that different clients will often have very different test environments and setups.
Extensions
In DuckDB v2.0, the quack extension will move from version 0.x to 1.0. The new version will unlock higher throughput for queries (both server to client and client to server) and better compatibility.
Other core extensions, such as httpfs, ducklake, iceberg or spatial, are also available in the alpha stage – please report any issues that you might encounter.
Community extensions can already be tested by providing a ref_next SHA, which builds them against the v2.0-cyanoptera branch before the release date. If no ref_next is provided, the ref SHA will be used once v2.0.0 is finalized.
Can I Help?
Yes, you can! DuckDB alpha clients are explicitly not production-ready, but you can already install them and throw some SQL queries at them to see whether your existing workloads work. Most are expected to be fine, some are expected to complete visibly faster, and some might result in an error. For the next few weeks, we are particularly interested in the latter group: are there environments, situations or queries where the DuckDB v2.0 alpha releases fall short?
If you find an issue, please open a bug report with a reproducible example, either in duckdb/duckdb or in the repository of the relevant client or extension.
DuckDB's main strength is its community: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, and your bug reports translate to stability gains for every user.
