Alex Monahan
Developer Advocate
Alex joins us from Intel where he worked as a data scientist building a DuckDB-powered analytics platform.
15 BLOG POSTS AND VIDEOS
60:41
2026-04-09
Zero-Latency Analytics in Your Application with Dives
BI tools were never built to be app interfaces — they're rigid, clunky, and add complexity to your user experience. Dives offer a different approach: interactive data apps you create with natural language that can be embedded directly into your applications. In this session, Alex Monahan walks through how to build a Dive and embed it in your app, with help from AI agents. You'll learn how to create interactive visualizations with natural language queries, embed Dives into your app with a secure sandbox, set up the auth flow so your users get read-only access without exposing credentials, and choose between server-side and dual execution with DuckDB-Wasm. Whether you're building customer-facing analytics or internal tools, this webinar shows you the full workflow from query to production-ready embed. See how Claude Code + Dives can get you from zero to a working data app fast.
Webinar
MotherDuck Features
BI & Visualization
App Development
58:00
2026-04-07
What's New in DuckDB 1.5!
Alex Monahan and Jacob Matson walk through DuckDB 1.5's biggest features including the VARIANT type, redesigned CLI, built-in GEOMETRY, and faster joins.
Webinar
55:29
2026-04-02
All About DuckLake: The O'Reilly Book
Matt Martin and Alex Monahan, coauthors of O'Reilly's DuckLake: The Definitive Guide, discuss what DuckLake is, how it simplifies lakehouse architecture, and why it replaces file-based metadata with a SQL database. Includes a live Q&A and the release of Chapter 1.
Webinar
Ecosystem
43:41
2026-03-26
Beyond Charts: Building Interactive Data Apps with MotherDuck Dives
Learn to build interactive data apps with MotherDuck Dives. Go beyond static charts with live SQL, React components, and shareable URLs.
Webinar
MotherDuck Features
BI & Visualization
2026/03/24 - Alex Monahan
Don't Fear the Agents - AI on the Data Lakehouse
Learn how MotherDuck's Hosted DuckLake combines lakehouse scale (borrowing the best ideas from Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake) with low latency and agent sandbox isolation, making it the simplest data lakehouse for AI-powered agentic workflows.
2026/03/09 - Alex Monahan
DuckDB 1.5 Features I am Excited About
DuckDB 1.5 is both faster and easier to use! JSON analysis can be up to 100x faster thanks to the VARIANT type and JSON shredding. Real-world queries are faster, including both basic and complex queries. Writes to Azure are supported, and checkpoint concurrency is dramatically improved.
2026/03/02 - Alex Monahan
Claude Code + Dives = Any data UI
Learn how to build custom interactive data visualizations using MotherDuck Dives and Claude Code. From setup to sharing, create refreshable React and SQL-powered visuals with natural language prompts.
2026-01-21
The MCP Sessions - Vol 2: Supply Chain Analytics
Jacob and Alex from MotherDuck query data using the MotherDuck MCP. Watch as they analyze 180,000 rows of shipment data through conversational AI, uncovering late delivery patterns, profitability insights, and operational trends with no SQL required!
Stream
AI, ML and LLMs
MotherDuck Features
SQL
BI & Visualization
Tutorial
2025-10-14
DuckLake: Making BIG DATA feel small (Coalesce 2025)
MotherDuck’s managed DuckLake data lakehouse blends the cost efficiency, scale, and openness of a lakehouse with the speed of a warehouse for truly joyful dbt pipelines. They will show you how!
Talk
2025/10/09 - Alex Monahan, Garrett O'Brien
DuckDB 1.4.1 and DuckLake 0.3 Land in MotherDuck: New SQL Syntax, Iceberg Interoperability, and Performance Gains
MotherDuck now supports DuckDB 1.4.1 and DuckLake 0.3, with new SQL syntax, faster sorting, Iceberg interoperability, and more. Read on for the highlights from these major releases.
2025/08/04 - Jacob Matson, Alex Monahan
Just Enough SQL to be Dangerous with AI
Learn essential SQL to verify AI-generated queries. Master SELECT, JOIN, and CTEs to safely analyze data with LLMs. Includes DuckDB examples and safety tips
2025-06-02
Taming file zoos: Data science with DuckDB database files
Tame "file zoos" with DuckDB! This talk reveals how DuckDB seamlessly integrates with Python to read/write diverse files (CSV, Parquet), organize data efficiently, enable larger-than-memory analysis, and streamline your workflows.
Python
Talk
0:52:48
2024-04-22
Local Dev, Cloud Prod with Dagster and MotherDuck
Develop locally and ship to production confidently with Dagster data pipelines, Evidence dashboards powered by DuckDB and Markdown, and the MotherDuck cloud data warehouse.
YouTube
Data Pipelines
