Build Types

DuckDB can be built in many different settings, most of these correspond directly to CMake but not all of them.

release

This build has been stripped of all the assertions and debug symbols and code, optimized for performance.

debug

This build runs with all the debug information, including symbols, assertions and #ifdef DEBUG blocks. Due to these, binaries of this build are expected to be slow. Note: the special debug defines are not automatically set for this build.

relassert

This build does not trigger the #ifdef DEBUG code blocks but it still has debug symbols that make it possible to step through the execution with line number information and D_ASSERT lines are still checked in this build. Binaries of this build mode are significantly faster than those of the debug mode.

reldebug

This build is similar to relassert in many ways, only assertions are also stripped in this build.

benchmark

This build is a shorthand for release with BUILD_BENCHMARK=1 set.

tidy-check

This creates a build and then runs Clang-Tidy to check for issues or style violations through static analysis. The CI will also run this check, causing it to fail if this check fails.

format-fix | format-changes | format-main

This doesn’t actually create a build, but uses the following format checkers to check for style issues:

• clang-format to fix format issues in the code.
• cmake-format to fix format issues in the CMakeLists.txt files.

The CI will also run this check, causing it to fail if this check fails.

Package Flags

For every package that is maintained by core DuckDB, there exists a flag in the Makefile to enable building the package. These can be enabled by either setting them in the current env, through set up files like bashrc or zshrc, or by setting them before the call to make, for example:

BUILD_PYTHON=1 make debug

BUILD_PYTHON

When this flag is set, the Python package is built.

BUILD_SHELL

When this flag is set, the CLI is built, this is usually enabled by default.

BUILD_BENCHMARK

When this flag is set, DuckDB’s in-house benchmark suite is built. More information about this can be found here.

BUILD_JDBC

When this flag is set, the Java package is built.

BUILD_ODBC

When this flag is set, the ODBC package is built.

Miscellaneous Flags

DISABLE_UNITY

To improve compilation time, we use Unity Build to combine translation units. This can however hide include bugs, this flag disables using the unity build so these errors can be detected.

DISABLE_SANITIZER

In some situations, running an executable that has been built with sanitizers enabled is not support / can cause problems. Julia is an example of this. With this flag enabled, the sanitizers are disabled for the build.

Overriding Git Hash and Version

It is possible to override the Git hash and version when building from source using the OVERRIDE_GIT_DESCRIBE environment variable. This is useful when building from sources that are not part of a complete Git repository (e.g., an archive file with no information on commit hashes and tags). For example:

OVERRIDE_GIT_DESCRIBE=v0.10.0-843-g09ea97d0a9 GEN=ninja make

Will result in the following output when running ./build/release/duckdb:

v0.10.1-dev843 09ea97d0a9
...