DuckDB is maintained by Dr. Mark Raasveldt & Prof. Dr. Hannes Mühleisen along with many other contributors from all over the world. Mark and Hannes have set up the DuckDB Foundation that collects donations and funds development and maintenance of DuckDB. Mark and Hannes are also co-founders of DuckDB Labs, which provides commercial services around DuckDB. Several other DuckDB contributors are also affiliated with DuckDB Labs.
DuckDB's initial development took place at the Database Architectures Group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Ducks are amazing animals. They can fly, walk and swim. They can also live off pretty much everything. They are quite resilient to environmental challenges. A duck's song will bring people back from the dead and inspires database research. They are thus the perfect mascot for a versatile and resilient data management system. Also the logo designs itself.

DuckDB is the name of the MIT licensed open-source project.
The DuckDB Foundation is a non-profit organization that holds the intellectual property of the DuckDB project. Its statutes also ensure DuckDB remains open-source under the MIT license in perpetuity. Donations to the DuckDB Foundation directly fund DuckDB development.
DuckDB Labs is a company based in Amsterdam that provides commercial support services for DuckDB. DuckDB Labs employs the core contributors of the DuckDB project.
MotherDuck is a venture-backed company creating a hybrid cloud/local platform using DuckDB. MotherDuck contracts with DuckDB Labs for development services, and DuckDB Labs owns a portion of MotherDuck. See the partnership announcement for details. To learn more about MotherDuck, see the CIDR 2024 paper on MotherDuck and the MotherDuck documentation.

You can download the DuckDB Logo here:

• Stacked logo: svg / png / pdf
  
• Horizontal logo: svg / png / pdf
  

Inverted variants for dark backgrounds:

• Stacked logo: svg / png / pdf
  
• Horizontal logo: svg / png / pdf
  

The DuckDB logo & website were designed by Jonathan Auch & Max Wohlleber.

Please consult the trademark guidelines for DuckDB™.

The DuckDB Website is hosted by GitHub Pages, its repository is at duckdb/duckdb-web. When the documentation is browsed from a desktop computer, every page has a "Page Source" button on the top that navigates you to its Markdown source file. Pull requests to fix issues or to expand the documentation section on DuckDB's features are very welcome. Before opening a pull request, please consult our Contributor Guide.

We welcome experiments comparing DuckDB's performance to other systems. To ensure fair comparison, we have two recommendations. First, try to use the latest DuckDB version available as a nightly build, which often has significant performance improvements compared to the last stable release. Second, consider consulting our DBTest 2018 paper Fair Benchmarking Considered Difficult: Common Pitfalls In Database Performance Testing for guidelines on how to avoid common issues in benchmarks.

DuckDB does not use explicit SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instructions because they greatly complicate portability and compilation. Instead, DuckDB uses implicit SIMD, where we go to great lengths to write our C++ code in such a way that the compiler can auto-generate SIMD instructions for the specific hardware. As an example why this is a good idea, it took 10 minutes to port DuckDB to the Apple Silicon architecture.

DuckDB supports persistent storage and stores the database as a single file, which includes all tables, views, indexes, macros, etc. present in the database. DuckDB's storage format uses a compressed columnar representation, which is compact but allows for efficient bulk updates. DuckDB can also run in in-memory mode, where no data is persisted to disk.

See the documentation on concurrency.

See the documentation on concurrency.

There is no official DuckDB Docker image available. DuckDB uses an in-process deployment model, where the client application and DuckDB are running in the same process. Additionally to the DuckDB clients for Python, R, and other programming languages, DuckDB is also available as a standalone command-line client. This client is available on a wide range of platforms and is portable without containerization, making it unnecessary to containerize the process for most deployments.

Since version 0.10.0 (released in February 2024), DuckDB is backwards-compatible when reading database files, i.e., newer versions of DuckDB are always able to read database files created with an older version of DuckDB. DuckDB also provides partial forwards-compatibility on a best-effort basis. See the storage page for more details. Compatibility is also guaranteed between different DuckDB clients (e.g., Python and R): a database file created with one client can be read with other clients.

DuckDB was designed with both data science and data engineering workloads in mind. Therefore, you can use DuckDB's SQL syntax to be highly flexible, or very precise, depending on your needs.

For data science users, who often run queries in an interactive fashion, DuckDB offers several mechanisms for quickly exploring data sets. For example, CSV files can be loaded by auto-inferring their schema using CREATE TABLE tbl AS FROM 'input.csv'. Moreover, there numerous SQL shorthands known as “friendly SQL” for more concise expressions, e.g., the GROUP BY ALL clause.

For data engineering use cases, DuckDB allows full control over the loading process, so it is possible to define the precise schema using a CREATE TABLE tbl ⟨schema⟩ statement and populate it using a COPY statement that specifies the CSV's dialect (delimiter, quotes, etc.). Most friendly SQL extensions are simple to rewrite to SQL queries that are fully compatible with PostgreSQL. For example, the GROUP BY ALL clause can be replaced with a GROUP BY clause and an explicit list of columns.