DuckDB is an open-source column-oriented relational database management system originally developed by Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in the Netherlands and first released in 2019. The project has over 6 million downloads per month. DuckDB supports a feature-rich SQL dialect complemented with deep integrations into client APIs. DuckDB v1.0.0 was released in June 2024. DuckDB is easy to install and deploy. It has zero external dependencies and runs in-process in its host application or as a single binary. DuckDB runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and all popular hardware architectures. It has idiomatic client APIs for major programming languages. DuckDB offers a rich SQL dialect. It can read and write file formats such as CSV, Parquet, and JSON, to and from the local file system and remote endpoints such as S3 buckets. DuckDB serves as a powerful engine for analyzing and transforming data residing in various formats like CSV, Parquet, JSON, or databases such as PostgreSQL and SQLite. It can be used transiently for data manipulation or to create persistent tables for analytical queries.
