I've been releasing the versions all the way since 1.5.3 and all community extensions.
d0100 · 2026-08-26 14:25:51 UTC
> a self-contained, signed extension ecosystem
What does this mean? Can I easily sign my own private extensions with my own key?
We are currently allowing unsigned extensions, loading them, then locking the duckdb config to prevent loading unsigned/untrusted extensions
rustyconover · 2026-08-26 14:38:17 UTC
In 2.0 you can sign extensions with your own key and have your own extension repo. Thats the plan at least.
In 1.5 - Haybarn has its own signing key, but its much faster to get extensions released and deployed.
geodel · 2026-08-26 14:14:32 UTC
Just like press freedom is for those who own press, nice things are for those who can buy nice things.
pepperoni_pizza · 2026-08-26 13:10:25 UTC
Congrats to the founders on their new generational wealth, but also what a shame.
echelon · 2026-08-26 13:25:57 UTC
If there's no price tag mentioned, it's likely not generational wealth.
fidotron · 2026-08-26 13:39:53 UTC
Also European so almost certainly underpriced themselves.
fourseventy · 2026-08-26 15:53:20 UTC
There is no way the price tag is less than tens of millions right?
willseth · 2026-08-26 16:23:04 UTC
At Google's size, they're not required to disclose acquisition prices well into the hundreds of millions
compiler-guy · 2026-08-26 16:27:25 UTC
They were acquired by AWS, not Google. But the point still stands.
tyre · 2026-08-26 13:43:29 UTC
Very much doubt it’s generational wealth. I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare.
My guess is that Amazon wants official hosted versions and doesn’t want to go through something like the Redis fiasco with licensing. In that case, they ended up having to support their own development anyway (with Valkey), so they might as well just buy the team.
DuckDB team probably gets a nice package and pay bump, but it’s really unlikely they’re getting hundreds of millions from this.
yurishimo · 2026-08-26 13:50:20 UTC
How much do you really need for generational wealth? In my opinion, if you're more than 10 years away from retirement and received a surprise $1 million, you're setup for the rest of your life and your children as well assuming they don't immediately blow it all when you die (that's what a good trust should be for).
Assuming historical returns, your money doubles roughly every 7 years, so within the rest of your lifetime, that 1 million should turn into at least 8. That's an extremely comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle on the interest payments alone. If your children don't spend it all, your grandchildren would easily have private jet money by the time their parents retire.
asib · 2026-08-26 13:59:38 UTC
1 mil is not generational wealth in the US. It is a big chunk of money, no doubt. It’ll buy a reasonable 2-3 bedroom house in the city I live in, with nothing left over. No one’s definition of generational wealth involves not touching the money for two generations…
fwip · 2026-08-26 14:12:26 UTC
The median home price is around $400K. You don't have to live somewhere stupid expensive.
jshen · 2026-08-26 14:23:14 UTC
Sure, but that's not generational wealth.
fwip · 2026-08-26 14:41:56 UTC
We must be operating on different definitions. Generational wealth means you have enough money to meaningfully improve the lives of your kids and give them a leg-up on life. A million dollars is enough to buy a house for each of your 2.5 kids.
If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
MeetingsBrowser · 2026-08-26 15:23:00 UTC
The commonly accepted definition of generational wealth ranges from around 1.5 to 5 million per child.
fwip · 2026-08-26 15:42:24 UTC
I can only find sources that define it the way I said, but I'm sure that folks who think a million dollars isn't enough to buy a house disagree.
asib · 2026-08-26 15:34:24 UTC
Generational wealth generally is used to mean something like you and at least your children can live very comfortably off of investment income for the rest of your lives, I.e. none of you have to work for a living. That’s why sibling’s def of 1.5-5m per child is much closer to the commonly understood meaning.
We can debate “live comfortably” if you want, but no 4.5 people are doing that from the investment proceeds of 1m.
What you are describing is kind of more like social mobility.
jimbokun · 2026-08-26 16:25:23 UTC
Generational wealth is generally used to describe not just a comfortable personal retirement but your children and their children and so on never needing to work if they are remotely responsible with the money.
ethagnawl · 2026-08-26 16:32:23 UTC
> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
Well said.
Where I live, one million dollars would allow me to pay off my house, open healthily sized investment accounts for my kids, pad my investment account, setup a trust and, overall, set my family up for a comfortable life in the future. I don't see how that isn't generational wealth.
MeetingsBrowser · 2026-08-26 17:16:25 UTC
Generational wealth is where you can also do all of the above for your kids and potentially their grandkids as well.
Basically the bar is higher than "something you can pass down". It is enough that the next generation does not need to worry about making money either.
pessimizer · 2026-08-26 16:32:59 UTC
> If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
Generational wealth is definitely not "affect[ing] how much money you can leave your kids." That's an equivocation - if you're leaving your kids a dollar, another dollar will "affect how much money you can leave your kids."
edit: you need a million dollars to securely retire at all, and that's if your parents, kids, or you don't get sick. If they do, a million is not only not "generational wealth" but it may not even last you three years.
slfnflctd · 2026-08-26 15:11:35 UTC
I have to agree, yurishimo's assumption of returns is wildly optimistic.
At a more sane expected return of 5% annually, you get $50k a year to live off of to just keep what you have (or rather, watch it slowly erode in value due to inflation).
That is basically a one person income, maybe two adults if you pinch pennies and live in a crappy apartment or a low-end house in a midwestern suburb.
You can get a lot more lucky with a million bucks than you can with 10k if you gamble, but there are no guarantees. Risk tolerance is the most impactful variable. For those in the low risk tolerance group, I think you'd need at least 2 mil these days. And that's with being frugal, as well as probably not having much left over for kids.
topaz0 · 2026-08-26 19:13:22 UTC
A house you own outright is already generational wealth
1123581321 · 2026-08-26 14:24:23 UTC
To do that, you would have to never touch the money and invest aggressively. Most wouldn’t do that unless they didn’t need the money, i.e. already rich so not newfound wealth.
You would also have to train your kids to responsibly use the money without demonstrating it, as you’d just be hoarding it. People don’t have a good track record there, either.
I think the best you could do generationally with a million would be to try to invest moderately and draw down a small percentage (2-3%) to demonstrate fully considered use of the money. This would keep you in a middle class income but give you more ability to donate charitably, vacation together, let one spouse retire earlier, solve a financial crisis for a child, etc.
Letting them in on the thinking would give them a good chance to handle a high six/low seven figure inheritance, depending on how the investing goes.
nixon_why69 · 2026-08-26 14:33:23 UTC
Assuming historical returns might be a little unsafe at a point in time near the peak of a bubble popping.
pstuart · 2026-08-26 14:49:46 UTC
I'd agree with that sentiment but that number would be more like $5M (which is nothing in the context of this acquisition). Inflation is not going to relent and having enough to actually enjoy some of that payout to have pseudo FU money and leave enough invested for children and grandchildren (a well-managed trust).
Buying a house in desirable areas is going to be in the ~ $1M range, college is going to be hundreds of thousands, etc.
menaerus · 2026-08-26 15:05:22 UTC
Assuming you're investing aggressively and not touching that money for the next 20 years, with the nominal return of 6% per year, adjusted for the inflation rate of 3% per year, 1M will increase to 1.8M. Not sure how you came up with 8M.
intuitionist · 2026-08-26 18:25:42 UTC
3% real return is… pretty pessimistic. You can about get that on long TIPS.
MeetingsBrowser · 2026-08-26 15:25:23 UTC
> How much do you really need for generational wealth?
Common definition is somewhere between 1.5 to 5 million per child.
topaz0 · 2026-08-26 19:15:46 UTC
Says who? Ive never heard this and can't find anyone saying this.
tyre · 2026-08-26 21:05:15 UTC
How much do you need for your children to not work or provide complete financial freedom (i.e. can buy a home, raise a family, etc. without thinking about the income of their job)? That is the "generational" in generational wealth.
You need more than $1.5m today should be $6m by the time they're 20. Depending on inflation, cost-of-living, tuition, etc. that might be enough.
People talking about generational wealth aren't saying, "what if they live a frugal life in the Topeka suburbs."
topaz0 · 2026-08-26 23:05:02 UTC
Generational wealth is just wealth that survives to the next generation. It doesn't have to be extravagant wealth when it gets there to count.
Also wealth does not start at the ability to live an extravagant life without a salary... You're wealthy way before that point.
MeetingsBrowser · 2026-08-26 23:27:41 UTC
This is probably the disconnect.
Technically any asset transferred to the next generation is “generational wealth”.
But in the context of a startup sale, when you say generational wealth almost nobody assumes you mean the ability to pass a few thousand down.
The common understanding is that you have enough money that future generations do not need to worry about money, assuming they maintain an average or slightly above average lifestyle and use the money responsibly.
topaz0 · 2026-08-27 00:16:36 UTC
> nobody
Speaking for yourself I guess
jimbokun · 2026-08-26 16:23:24 UTC
You said 10 years away from retirement so that’s closer to 2 million than 8.
_zoltan_ · 2026-08-26 16:24:24 UTC
1 mil as generational wealth? what?
62951413 · 2026-08-26 20:29:08 UTC
$1M is a newly built condo in the East Bay with HOA >$800/month.
Not even an 80 year old 1,300 sqft house in the same area.
jongjong · 2026-08-26 22:38:15 UTC
$1 million net worth is massive. You can buy a house in a remote place, invest in companies and live off of the investment perpetually without having to work.
hobofan · 2026-08-26 14:19:09 UTC
> I’m not sure how much people think open source companies are worth, but the path to VC-scale profitability is incredibly rare.
MotherDuck, a semi-competitor of theirs has raised $100mil in funding. DuckLabs has reportedly taken no external funding (so all ownership is with the founders) and was profitable with 30+ employees.
On the sidelines, other companies behind beloved open source products, like Astral, Astro, Bun are getting bought left and right.
With that as a backdrop, I think they should have been able to get quite a good payout.
datadrivenangel · 2026-08-26 14:48:16 UTC
DuckLabs is the company that does consulting and DuckDB development, the DuckDB foundation actually owns DuckDB the project.
The DuckDB foundation owns some equity in MotherDuck, which is a data lakehouse platform based on DuckDB, and all three have been moving closely together in making DuckDB better locally as well as in the role of a query engine that really threatens a lot of amazon's role in data lakehouses. DuckDB in the hands of a good team means that you can use AWS almost only for storage, instead of using any of the managed services.
ferguess_k · 2026-08-26 13:10:53 UTC
Wow congratulations for the original authors, but I hope it doesn't impact the users. I can imagine that it is very useful for AWS because they don't exactly have something similar.
I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.
newtwentysix · 2026-08-26 13:11:45 UTC
super curious what exactly does it mean to acquire an open source product.
grim_io · 2026-08-26 13:19:29 UTC
Complete control over what gets merged and worked on by the core team.
orian · 2026-08-26 13:21:40 UTC
it was already like that, and merging 3rd party changes to the core was troublesome, so maybe aws just bought them cause of this reason :D
eventualcomp · 2026-08-26 13:19:32 UTC
Devs gotta eat. Yeah the code is out there but the code is a result of a lot of thinking, prioritization, research into what is needed from the actual product. So now AWS owns that mindshare and talent and will (probably heavily) influence its decisions. I just hope DuckDB doesn't stray from its goal of being the SQLite (e.g. embedded) OLAP.
pjmlp · 2026-08-26 13:22:36 UTC
When will folks finally learn that if they like having a salary, devs that produce tools actually would like to have one as well?
geodel · 2026-08-26 15:36:06 UTC
Never. When it comes to me I am just a poor hustler, surviving a s/w job to make ends meet. When it comes to open source I am gonna hold those guys to highest standard, code, github behavior, tweets, everything must live up to best human ideals.
So give your tools, your life, free bug fixing, priority attention to me because I am getting my paid job done. Why they need money anyway, they can leave on reputation of OSS contributors. Also not to forget I donated 5 dollars last year so now give me full certified audit of your finances of last 5 years.
nobleach · 2026-08-26 14:32:19 UTC
It can go different ways. Redis, Elastic Search, MySQL, and Java all have different stories with some common threads.
fidotron · 2026-08-26 13:12:16 UTC
Maybe they learned AWS were planning on releasing a managed clone without their involvement?
skeeter2020 · 2026-08-26 16:55:35 UTC
That seems unlikely because AWS needs to build proprietary features within their services to lock in paying (enterprise) users. The problem now is that labs will inevitably focus on this work, which I view as opposed to local, in-process when your paycheque comes from selling hosted services.
bornfreddy · 2026-08-26 17:20:44 UTC
And forced AWS to acquire them instead? Nice trick.
hobofan · 2026-08-26 13:12:37 UTC
I'm glad that DuckDB has a foundation in place and hope it is resilient enough to push the DB forward when the time comes.
Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.
ferguess_k · 2026-08-26 13:20:54 UTC
Yup, they are very serious about DynamoDB and it is a very good product. Wish they released more information about it, though.
It is their previous one. I did read another paper about DynamoDB, but still there is not much details.
For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
Man I admire AWS marketing team for convincing people DynamoDB is a very good product.
100 items max per Transaction
BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max
low write limits on same key
Item size 400 KB max
etc.
nixon_why69 · 2026-08-26 14:29:40 UTC
The reason it's good is because, although it is bad, you never have to worry about it in terms of maintenance, admin or scale. It's like lambda for databases.
For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
supriyo-biswas · 2026-08-26 17:34:17 UTC
They should really call it "data-structures as a service" rather than a database, really. Programming against it always reminds me of Leetcode problems, having to define your columns in a way to suit the very specific lookup patterns that they allow for.
Spivak · 2026-08-26 20:31:09 UTC
I mean this reminds me of Firebase v1 and FoundationDB I think both of which have a favorable reputation for quality in both design and implementation. I do think there's something to be said for being forced to code against what operations are actually fast in your DB. Once it works you can be reasonably confident it will also be fast rather than the typical RDBMS experience of getting an abundance of rope with which to hang yourself with. You often won't find out until it's already load bearing that your query doesn't scale.
LPisGood · 2026-08-26 21:39:11 UTC
You do have to worry about scale with lambda though. It’s not super hard to hit a rate limit where warm up times start being a real problem.
ferguess_k · 2026-08-26 16:50:42 UTC
Thanks, I don't really get any chance to seriously use or manage OLTP databases (mostly working with OLAP ones myself) so it is good to know about this. The 400KB limit is indeed very limiting -- I had to truncate some data because of that.
I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
nostrebored · 2026-08-26 16:58:20 UTC
Some of the largest, highest TPS, highest throughput systems in the world use DDB.
The constraints are what let this happen. Unconstraining it might make a better generalist product but part of what you're opting into with DDB is the dumb "put an item in get an item out semantics" and the other side is knowing that it will still work if that volume increases dramatically.
regularfry · 2026-08-27 11:08:10 UTC
Which makes it a great product in a comparatively small niche, and a "meh" premature optimisation pretty much everywhere else. Except for right at the bottom end where it's a step up from a JSON file in an S3 bucket.
solatic · 2026-08-26 19:05:53 UTC
DynamoDB has basically two legitimate use-cases that I'm familiar with:
1. You're selling a system to a customer to use within their own AWS account, that you will have no access to, and it needs a transactional datastore (not just an object bucket) of some kind. The fact that it costs nothing by default (particularly valuable when the customer is trying to deploy a proof-of-concept), scales more-or-less perfectly without anybody touching it, requires zero day-to-day maintenance by you or the customer, and all it will ever ask is that you throw money at it, is very, very much a feature. One example I'm familiar with in the wild is Teleport: https://goteleport.com/docs/reference/deployment/backends/#d...
2. You have a huge OLTP workload that fits Dynamo's KV patterns (e.g. Amazon.com shopping carts, which is what it was originally built for). You don't care how much DynamoDB costs (in either dollars or engineering limitations) because any alternative would melt your face off if you even tried.
Most of the pain that comes from Dynamo is people who try to use it as a primary datastore in place of a relational database just to get the serverless pricing model. It's not worth giving up the flexibility on greenfield systems. It does become worth it to give up the flexibility when your system is mature and you don't have genuine flexibility anymore anyway.
shermantanktop · 2026-08-26 21:07:24 UTC
Anyone trying to use a kv store for relational workloads is The same kind of person who uses a kv cache with durability features instead of a kv store. You can’t blame the tech for their mistakes.
senderista · 2026-08-26 15:47:24 UTC
They have published 2 academic papers about it. What more do you want, operational details?
ferguess_k · 2026-08-26 19:17:01 UTC
For example, I would like to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export before I run one.
One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
senderista · 2026-08-27 19:16:47 UTC
Unfortunately that seems like a question for AWS support. I'm not sure they'd be willing to document a formula.
fullstop · 2026-08-26 13:20:55 UTC
Surely they are better than Google in this regard.
hobofan · 2026-08-26 13:27:21 UTC
AFAIK Google is much better at not tearing well-working teams apart in reorgs, and letting people go they have acquihired a few quarters earlier.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
fwip · 2026-08-26 14:09:44 UTC
Youtube is another famous example.
nixon_why69 · 2026-08-26 14:40:41 UTC
Google is better but it's an incredibly low bar.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
hobofan · 2026-08-26 15:07:09 UTC
> Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
SoftTalker · 2026-08-26 15:08:19 UTC
They should be fine as long as they remember to use the new cover sheets. I'm sure they got a copy of the memo.
NewJazz · 2026-08-26 17:10:02 UTC
Don't worry, I'll send them another copy just in case.
SlightlyLeftPad · 2026-08-26 21:54:06 UTC
Ooo yeah. Mmk that’d be great.
darkwater · 2026-08-26 17:10:34 UTC
> Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
Really no idea, just asking.
nixon_why69 · 2026-08-26 17:21:51 UTC
I'm actually curious too, haven't been there in a while. It's possible that the MBR pyramid has become LLM assisted on all sides but the cultural themes are surely all still there.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
flopsamjetsam · 2026-08-26 20:21:47 UTC
LLM to write it, then all the managers just use LLM to summarise it :)
timcambrant · 2026-08-26 20:52:56 UTC
The next logical step to ensure MBR quality would be to introduce MBR reviews before filing, also done by LLMs of course.
Comments
I hope the future for DuckDB is still bright
https://query.farm/haybarn/
Or
https://github.com/Query-farm-haybarn
I've been releasing the versions all the way since 1.5.3 and all community extensions.
What does this mean? Can I easily sign my own private extensions with my own key?
We are currently allowing unsigned extensions, loading them, then locking the duckdb config to prevent loading unsigned/untrusted extensions
In 1.5 - Haybarn has its own signing key, but its much faster to get extensions released and deployed.
My guess is that Amazon wants official hosted versions and doesn’t want to go through something like the Redis fiasco with licensing. In that case, they ended up having to support their own development anyway (with Valkey), so they might as well just buy the team.
DuckDB team probably gets a nice package and pay bump, but it’s really unlikely they’re getting hundreds of millions from this.
Assuming historical returns, your money doubles roughly every 7 years, so within the rest of your lifetime, that 1 million should turn into at least 8. That's an extremely comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle on the interest payments alone. If your children don't spend it all, your grandchildren would easily have private jet money by the time their parents retire.
If getting a million dollars wouldn't affect how much money you can leave your kids, you already have generational wealth.
We can debate “live comfortably” if you want, but no 4.5 people are doing that from the investment proceeds of 1m.
What you are describing is kind of more like social mobility.
Well said.
Where I live, one million dollars would allow me to pay off my house, open healthily sized investment accounts for my kids, pad my investment account, setup a trust and, overall, set my family up for a comfortable life in the future. I don't see how that isn't generational wealth.
Basically the bar is higher than "something you can pass down". It is enough that the next generation does not need to worry about making money either.
Generational wealth is definitely not "affect[ing] how much money you can leave your kids." That's an equivocation - if you're leaving your kids a dollar, another dollar will "affect how much money you can leave your kids."
edit: you need a million dollars to securely retire at all, and that's if your parents, kids, or you don't get sick. If they do, a million is not only not "generational wealth" but it may not even last you three years.
At a more sane expected return of 5% annually, you get $50k a year to live off of to just keep what you have (or rather, watch it slowly erode in value due to inflation).
That is basically a one person income, maybe two adults if you pinch pennies and live in a crappy apartment or a low-end house in a midwestern suburb.
You can get a lot more lucky with a million bucks than you can with 10k if you gamble, but there are no guarantees. Risk tolerance is the most impactful variable. For those in the low risk tolerance group, I think you'd need at least 2 mil these days. And that's with being frugal, as well as probably not having much left over for kids.
You would also have to train your kids to responsibly use the money without demonstrating it, as you’d just be hoarding it. People don’t have a good track record there, either.
I think the best you could do generationally with a million would be to try to invest moderately and draw down a small percentage (2-3%) to demonstrate fully considered use of the money. This would keep you in a middle class income but give you more ability to donate charitably, vacation together, let one spouse retire earlier, solve a financial crisis for a child, etc.
Letting them in on the thinking would give them a good chance to handle a high six/low seven figure inheritance, depending on how the investing goes.
Buying a house in desirable areas is going to be in the ~ $1M range, college is going to be hundreds of thousands, etc.
Common definition is somewhere between 1.5 to 5 million per child.
You need more than $1.5m today should be $6m by the time they're 20. Depending on inflation, cost-of-living, tuition, etc. that might be enough.
People talking about generational wealth aren't saying, "what if they live a frugal life in the Topeka suburbs."
Also wealth does not start at the ability to live an extravagant life without a salary... You're wealthy way before that point.
Technically any asset transferred to the next generation is “generational wealth”.
But in the context of a startup sale, when you say generational wealth almost nobody assumes you mean the ability to pass a few thousand down.
The common understanding is that you have enough money that future generations do not need to worry about money, assuming they maintain an average or slightly above average lifestyle and use the money responsibly.
Speaking for yourself I guess
MotherDuck, a semi-competitor of theirs has raised $100mil in funding. DuckLabs has reportedly taken no external funding (so all ownership is with the founders) and was profitable with 30+ employees.
On the sidelines, other companies behind beloved open source products, like Astral, Astro, Bun are getting bought left and right.
With that as a backdrop, I think they should have been able to get quite a good payout.
The DuckDB foundation owns some equity in MotherDuck, which is a data lakehouse platform based on DuckDB, and all three have been moving closely together in making DuckDB better locally as well as in the role of a query engine that really threatens a lot of amazon's role in data lakehouses. DuckDB in the hands of a good team means that you can use AWS almost only for storage, instead of using any of the managed services.
I use DuckDB extensively for local dev as well as a parquet viewer.
So give your tools, your life, free bug fixing, priority attention to me because I am getting my paid job done. Why they need money anyway, they can leave on reputation of OSS contributors. Also not to forget I donated 5 dollars last year so now give me full certified audit of your finances of last 5 years.
Out of all the big orgs, Amazon is probably the one that has the least regard for keeping technically interesting projects alive, and the certainly will bulldoze it for some dumb reason when the next re-org comes.
For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
100 items max per Transaction BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max low write limits on same key Item size 400 KB max etc.
For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
The constraints are what let this happen. Unconstraining it might make a better generalist product but part of what you're opting into with DDB is the dumb "put an item in get an item out semantics" and the other side is knowing that it will still work if that volume increases dramatically.
1. You're selling a system to a customer to use within their own AWS account, that you will have no access to, and it needs a transactional datastore (not just an object bucket) of some kind. The fact that it costs nothing by default (particularly valuable when the customer is trying to deploy a proof-of-concept), scales more-or-less perfectly without anybody touching it, requires zero day-to-day maintenance by you or the customer, and all it will ever ask is that you throw money at it, is very, very much a feature. One example I'm familiar with in the wild is Teleport: https://goteleport.com/docs/reference/deployment/backends/#d...
2. You have a huge OLTP workload that fits Dynamo's KV patterns (e.g. Amazon.com shopping carts, which is what it was originally built for). You don't care how much DynamoDB costs (in either dollars or engineering limitations) because any alternative would melt your face off if you even tried.
Most of the pain that comes from Dynamo is people who try to use it as a primary datastore in place of a relational database just to get the serverless pricing model. It's not worth giving up the flexibility on greenfield systems. It does become worth it to give up the flexibility when your system is mature and you don't have genuine flexibility anymore anyway.
One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
Really no idea, just asking.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.