Top all-time · #716
MotherDuck
Company blog · motherduck.com/blogdataprogramming
MotherDuck is the company blog at motherduck.com, writing about data and programming. Since 2022, 91 different Hacker News readers have linked it 156 times, most often “Big data is dead (2023)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link MotherDuck's blog mainly for its 'Big Data is Dead' argument that most workloads are small, plus posts on scaling up and customer data sizes. Mostly cited as support in DuckDB threads.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The modern cloud data warehouse powered by DuckDB. Serverless SQL analytics with no infrastructure to manage—query your data in seconds. Start free.
Most-linked posts?
- Big data is dead (2023)11 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2023-02-07
- /7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-11-16
- Fixit: An Unreasonably Effective AI Error Fixer for DuckDB SQL5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-01-03
- Redshift Files: The Hunt for Big Data4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-07
- Perf Is Not Enough3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-01-18
- The Column Explorer: A Birds Eye View of Your Data3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-14
- Agentic SQL for Free: Qwen3.8 27B and DuckDB3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-29
- Getting started with modern GIS using DuckDB2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-21
- Differential storage: A key building block for a DuckDB-based data warehouse2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-12
- Data Engineering Is the Cache Invalidation Problem Ft. Josh Wills2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-09
What Hacker News says?
You are right. AWS did not acquire the DuckDB technology itself, which is MIT-licensed open source and governed by the DuckDB Foundation which holds most of the related IP [1]. What they did acquire is DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based services and development company behind the technology which is owned by and employs the creators and major contributors. And MotherDuck is a US-based venture-funded commercial company, w…
Comment linking /
on “AWS Acquires DuckLabs”Submitted Big data is dead (2023) as a story · 585 points
HN discussionHey, MotherDucker here! We've been working closely with the DuckLabs team since day one, and the collaboration will continue! You can read more here: https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-amazon/
Comment linking /blog/duckdb-amazon/
on “AWS Acquires DuckLabs”Submitted Instant SQL for results as you type in DuckDB UI as a story · 378 points
HN discussionWhat's the relationship between MotherDuck ( https://motherduck.com ) and DuckLabs?
Comment linking /
on “AWS Acquires DuckLabs”Submitted Perf Is Not Enough as a story · 262 points
HN discussionYou might want to consider seeing how far vertical scaling can bring you. https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/ Is a good read
Comment linking /blog/big-data-is-dead/
on “Polars”Submitted Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster as a story · 223 points
HN discussionMotherduck has an excellent article about this: https://motherduck.com/blog/the-simple-joys-of-scaling-up/
Comment linking /blog/the-simple-joys-of-scaling-up/
on “The DuckDB Local UI”Submitted pg_duckdb: Splicing Duck and Elephant DNA as a story · 186 points
HN discussion(I designed and built the Column Explorer feature) Observable's column summary feature is very nice! But I do think there's a very common lineage around these kinds of diagnostics which motivated both Observables and ours. See Jeff Heer's profiler paper[1] for more. I'm very passionate about this area because I think "first mile problems" are underserved by most tools, but they take the longest to work out. We had t…
Comment linking /blog/introducing-column-explorer/
on “The DuckDB Local UI”Submitted Why Semantic Layers Matter (and how to build one with DuckDB) as a story · 152 points
HN discussionThe docs say that the extension's server is configured here: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/ui#remote-url But yeah, I can't find docs nor source for the UI. And the extension docs refer to MotherDuck's own UI: https://motherduck.com/docs/getting-started/motherduck-quick... So, a bit confusing way this is set up.
Comment linking /docs/getting-started/motherduck-quick-tour/
on “The DuckDB Local UI”Submitted An open source DuckDB text to SQL LLM as a story · 131 points
HN discussionThe UI looks nice and is by itself a welcome addition. I am somewhat at odds with it being a default extension build into DuckDB release. This still is a feature/product coming from another company than the makers of DuckDB [1], though they did announce a partnership with makers of this UI [2]. Whilst DuckDB has so far thrived without VC money, MotherDuck has (at least) 100M in VC [3]. I guess I'm wondering where th…
Comment linking /blog/motherduck-open-for-all-with-series-b/
on “The DuckDB Local UI”Submitted What Happens When You Put a Database in the Browser? as a story · 106 points
HN discussionI really like the columns explorer, https://motherduck.com/blog/introducing-column-explorer/ . Just a few days ago I have been looking for existing column explorers that look like from Kaggle Dataset, but I was not able to find anything. And this one by DuckDB is better!
Comment linking /blog/introducing-column-explorer/
on “The DuckDB Local UI”Submitted Differential storage: A key building block for a DuckDB-based data warehouse as a story · 98 points
HN discussionIndeed the "no-moat" (weight exfiltration of any openly accessible model) is something that makes me optimistic. That, and the fact that most tasks have "capacity thresholds" which on-device models will increasingly be able to saturate. One example is SQL query generation from text (example: duckdb-text2sql https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-text2sql-llm/ ).
Comment linking /blog/duckdb-text2sql-llm/
on “ChatGPT Atlas”Submitted The Prompt() Function: Use the Power of LLMs with SQL as a story · 56 points
HN discussionApologies for the shameless plug but do checkout https://geobase.app We built it with such use cases in mind and solves the scaling issues with geo data driven apps. We are in private beta but happy to give you early access if you hit us up. We were also recently featured on the motherduck blog https://motherduck.com/blog/pushing-geo-boundaries-with-moth...
Comment linking /blog/pushing-geo-boundaries-with-motherduck-geobase/
on “I mapped almost every USA traffic death in the 21st century”Submitted Big Data Is Dead as a story · 43 points
HN discussionyeah, glad the hype around big data is dead. Not a lot of solid numbers in here, but this post covers it well[0]. We have duckdb embedded in our product[1] and it works perfectly well for billions of rows of a data without the hadoop overhead. 0 - https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/ 1 - https://www.definite.app/
Comment linking /blog/big-data-is-dead/
on “Embeddings are a good starting point for the AI curious app developer”Submitted Perf Is Not Enough as a story · 29 points
HN discussionThis is a quite good allegory for the way AI is currently discussed (perhaps the outcome will be different this time round). Particularly the scary slide[1] with the up-and-to-the-right graph, which is used in a near identical fashion today to show an apparently inevitable march of progress in the AI space due to scaling laws. [2] https://motherduck.com/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb-as...
Comment linking /_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb-assets-prod.motherduck.com%2Fassets%2Fimg%2Fimage_2_0f68796072.jpg&w=1920&q=75
on “Big data is dead (2023)”Submitted The Column Explorer: A Birds Eye View of Your Data as a story · 26 points
HN discussionShameless plug - MotherDuck[0] is a serverless managed DuckDB data warehouse with some interesting properties: - Managed storage with zero-copy clone (and upcoming time travel) - Secure Sharing - Hybrid Mode that allows folks to combine client (WASM, UI, CLI, etc) with cloud data - Approved and supported ecosystem of third party vendors - Since we're running DuckDB in production, we're working very closely with the…
Comment linking /
on “DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database”Submitted Redshift Files: The Hunt for Big Data as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI am working on https://geobase.app/ which is a platform for geospatial full-stack developers. We have created workflows that a specific to the geospatial, mapping and GIS industry use cases. This is currently in private beta but going live in a few weeks. It is built on top of supabase's self-hosted stack. We were recently also featured on motherduck's blog https://motherduck.com/blog/pushing-geo-boundaries-with-mo…
Comment linking /blog/pushing-geo-boundaries-with-motherduck-geobase/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?”Submitted Branch, Test, Deploy: A Git-Inspired Approach for Data as a story · 15 points
HN discussion
