__Alex Monahan__
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a13x.bsky.social
__Alex Monahan__
@a13x.bsky.social
DuckDB hype man, MotherDucker (I work at MotherDuck!), SQL nut, Pythonista, reluctant JS dev
3 options:
- Keep the amazing name Duck Lake
- Get rid of that pesky space and go full DuckLake
- Towny McTownFace
November 1, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jordan Tigani (@jrdntgn.bsky.social) will present how @motherduck.com supports modern workloads with DuckLake. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...
[Future Data] DuckLake: Learning from Cloud Data Warehouses to Build a Robust "Lakehouse" - Carnegie Mellon Database Group
When building scalable data systems, it is easy to focus on the... Read More +
db.cs.cmu.edu
October 6, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Are you streaming into your Lakehouse?

Traditional formats suffered with the “many small files” problem — OLAP engines merge them reactively with long jobs. ⏳

DuckLake takes a proactive path: Data Inlining + async flush to parquet while always keeping data queryable ⚡
September 29, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
when I say “storage is cheaper now” this is what I mean

topicpartition.io/definitions/...
Small Data
Small Data Small data appears to be a very exciting movement that is moving the overton window away from Big Data onto much simpler and cheaper solutions ...
topicpartition.io
September 28, 2025 at 1:03 PM
How many 6 year old databases get 3x faster sorting??? When it was already world-class??? Amazing stuff from DuckDB!
duckdb.org DuckDB @duckdb.org · Sep 25
We published a new deep dive by Laurens Kuiper, who recently redesigned DuckDB's sort.

One data point: ordering the TPC-H SF100 lineitem table with the memory limit set to 30 GB is 3× faster in DuckDB v1.4 than in v1.3.

Read more at duckdb.org/2025/09/24/s...
Redesigning DuckDB's Sort, Again
After four years, we've decided to redesign DuckDB's sort implementation, again. In this post, we present and evaluate the new design.
duckdb.org
September 26, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
🚀 We released version 0.3 of the DuckLake specification and the DuckDB ducklake extension today. It includes interoperability with Iceberg, support for geometry types and more.

Check the announcement blog for more details ducklake.select/2025/09/17/d...
September 18, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Fall 2025 Seminar Schedule:
Sep 22: Apache Iceberg
Sep 29: Apache Hudi
Oct 06: @motherduck.com
Oct 13: SpiralDB Vortex
Oct 27: @singlestore.com
Nov 03: @deltalakeoss.bsky.social
Nov 10: Mooncake
Nov 17: @firebolthq.bsky.social
Nov 24: @xtdb.com
Dec 01: Apache Polaris
September 17, 2025 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Such a fun listen on ducklake and duckdb with @hannes.muehleisen.org and @markraasveldt.bsky.social!

Learned a lot, the future of ducklake looks very bright!

overcast.fm/+AAH1YOLrL6Q
Duck Lake: Simplifying the Lakehouse Ecosystem — Data Engineering Podcast
overcast.fm
September 12, 2025 at 11:42 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Excited to be a keynote speaker at PyData Amsterdam 2025 (September 24–26). My talk is titled 'Minus Three Tier: Data Architecture Turned Upside Down'.

Use code PYDATADB10 for 10% off tickets
amsterdam.pydata.org/conference
#PDAmsterdam2025 #10YearsPDAmsterdam
September 10, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
I've been leading the data infrastructure efforts at my job (I used to work as a Data Engineer in big tech) and the stack we've landed on is so enjoyable to work with.

@dagster.io - Orchestration
@duckdb.org - Database
@motherduck.com - Data Warehouse/storage
DBT - Data modeling
September 5, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Laurens Kuiper from @duckdb.org presented DuckDB's new memory assignment policy to run multi-join pipelines out-of-core with gracious performance degradation when join hash tables increasingly do not fit in RAM.

A well-attended and -delivered talk!

paper: vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p2748-kuiper.pdf
September 4, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
Bad news: we had to postpone today's episode.

Good news: @tylerhillery.com has a great blog entry that features some of the Oxide and Friends back catalog you might have missed!
I wrote about why I believe the Oxide and Friends podcast will have a greater impact on their mission to change computing forever than their rack scale computer

tylerhillery.com/blog/oxide-a...
August 28, 2025 at 12:24 AM
"GROUP BY ALL" was added to Oracle! Friendlier SQL to the rescue!
August 15, 2025 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
🔥 DuckDB is featured in @fireship.bsky.social's “100 seconds” series:

🚀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHm6...
DuckDB in 100 Seconds
YouTube video by Fireship
www.youtube.com
August 14, 2025 at 9:37 PM
DuckDB may have an adorable mascot, but this is serious DB tech! As a larger-than-memory system, data durability is critical!
avi.im v @avi.im · Aug 10
I went through DuckDB's WAL, and it does everything I was asking for in my blog post:

1. Per record checksum
2. Explicit error on checksum failure
3. Configurable behavior
4. Partial recovery
5. Safe truncation of the WAL only when WAL contents are checkpointed
avi.im v @avi.im · Jul 24
Published a new post: "PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data"

This is a follow up to my previous posts. When SQLite encounters checksum failures in WAL, instead of raising an error, it drops all subsequent frames; even if they are not corrupt. It's not a bug
August 10, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
I went through DuckDB's WAL, and it does everything I was asking for in my blog post:

1. Per record checksum
2. Explicit error on checksum failure
3. Configurable behavior
4. Partial recovery
5. Safe truncation of the WAL only when WAL contents are checkpointed
avi.im v @avi.im · Jul 24
Published a new post: "PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data"

This is a follow up to my previous posts. When SQLite encounters checksum failures in WAL, instead of raising an error, it drops all subsequent frames; even if they are not corrupt. It's not a bug
August 10, 2025 at 11:30 AM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
We just published a deep dive on spatial joins in DuckDB by @maxxen.bsky.social.

In this blog post, Max explains how spatial joins evolved in DuckDB and how the current operator harnesses R-Trees.

Read the full post at duckdb.org/2025/08/08/s...
August 8, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
#SD25 online continues tomorrow!

Join Cpt. @hannes.muehleisen.org for his talk on DuckLake

Aug 4 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CET

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQEU...
August 3, 2025 at 2:15 PM
We launched huge Mega and Giga instances this week, and the Small Data conference will celebrate that now we can all make big data feel small!

Crunching large datasets in the year 2025 should not be complicated. Join us to learn from some of the best in the biz!
July 17, 2025 at 10:43 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
@duckdb-gsheets.com now supports ducklake!
July 17, 2025 at 2:03 PM
HUGE day for MotherDuck! These giant Mega and Giga instances make even big data feel small. Easily crunch through even your toughest data problems!
🦆 NEW: Mega and Giga ducklings are here!

For when your data is too big, your queries too complex, and "fast enough" isn't fast enough.

Learn More: motherduck.com/blog/announc...
July 16, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Every once in a while, you can take a query from an hour to a couple of seconds... What a feeling! Gotta let it marinate for a minute until jumping into the next one...
July 15, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
📢 DuckLake 0.2 is out! We added new features to the specification and improved support in the DuckDB ducklake extension.

See the announcement blog post at duckdb.org/2025/07/04/d....
July 4, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by __Alex Monahan__
A DuckLake reader for PySpark in ~30 lines of code. Despite looking simple, still partitions work across Spark nodes. Zero external dependencies, just the DuckDB JDBC driver. Try that with your favorite lakehouse technology :-)
July 2, 2025 at 7:20 PM