DuckDB has gone from a research project at CWI Amsterdam in 2019 to one of the most widely adopted databases of the past decade. The list of places it shows up is long: notebooks, ETL pipelines, dashboards, CI test runners, embedded analytics inside SaaS products, even an iPhone running TPC-H at scale factor 100 .

iPhone in a box of dry ice, running TPC-H. ( source )

Companies have started building real products around it. MotherDuck is wrapping DuckDB into a cloud data warehouse. BI and data app platforms like Hex, Omni, and Evidence use it as an in-app execution engine and cache. Fivetran's Managed Data Lake Service uses DuckDB inside its data-lake writer for merging and compaction. Rill builds an open-source BI tool on top of it. We use it at Greybeam too, powering millions of queries for BI and analytics workloads.

What is DuckDB?

DuckDB is an in-process analytical SQL database .…