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Amazon Acquires DuckLabs and Integrates DuckDB in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
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Amazon has acquired DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind analytical database DuckDB. Financial terms were not disclosed. DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue to lead the team and the open-source project’s technical direction at AWS.
DuckDB is designed for fast analytical queries on datasets of around one terabyte or less. AWS vice president Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec said it targeted the 90%+ of data queries used in analysis and dashboarding. She argued its optimisations suit agentic AI workloads, where agents inspect data and run small exploratory queries.
DuckLabs sought to reassure the community. DuckDB and components including DuckLake and Quack will remain free and open-source under the MIT licence. The non-profit DuckDB Foundation will continue supervising the projects.
The community welcomed the news with some scepticism. On Reddit, adappergentlefolk hoped the acquisition would not slow innovation. They were glad the team could cash in while keeping most work open-source under the foundation.
Andy Warfield, a distinguished engineer at AWS, described how the relationship matured. Initial contact came when the S3 team was working on S3 Tables. Over roughly two years, the teams explored AWS Lambda for DuckDB queries and smoothed integrations through ATTACH and CONNECT commands.
Following the acquisition, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is the first service with a user-facing DuckDB-powered feature. Esra Kayabali, principal solutions architect at AWS, said it simplifies combining recent Aurora transactional data with historical records in Amazon S3. A single query can combine live operational data with Apache Iceberg tables managed through AWS Glue Data Catalog, plus Parquet and Iceberg data in Amazon S3 and S3 Tables.
Processing stays within Amazon Aurora, avoiding network hops and reverse ETL pipelines. AWS framed the deal as widening the co-founders’ reach. Mühleisen and Raasveldt said AWS gives them resources and reach to bring the technology to more developers.
