--- title: "Simon Späti - MotherDuck Blog" description: "Simon is a Data Engineer and Technical Author with 20+ years of experience in the data field. He's the author of the Data Engineering Blog (ssp.sh), curator of the Data Engineering Vault (vault.ssp.sh), and currently writes a book about Data Engineering Design Patterns (dedp.online). Simon maintains an awareness of open-source data engineering technologies and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the community." canonical: "https://motherduck.com/authors/simon-spati/" --- # Simon Späti Simon Späti's photo Technical Author & Data Engineer Simon is a Data Engineer and Technical Author with 20+ years of experience in the data field. He's the author of the Data Engineering Blog (ssp.sh), curator of the Data Engineering Vault (vault.ssp.sh), and currently writes a book about Data Engineering Design Patterns (dedp.online). Simon maintains an awareness of open-source data engineering technologies and enjoys sharing his knowledge with the community. ## 43 BLOG POSTS AND VIDEOS [2026/08/13 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-august-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter : August 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-august-2026) The August 2026 DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: giving every agent its own embedded DuckDB, the ADBC extension reaching 30+ external databases, async I/O landing in v2.0, ISO GQL graph queries, Perspective 5.0 pushdown, plus a community spotlight on Kyle Cheung. [2026/07/31 - Simon Späti](/blog/figma-for-agents-airflow-creator-maxime-beauchemin/) ### [Figma for Agents: How Airflow's Creator Coordinates AI ft. Maxime Beauchemin](/blog/figma-for-agents-airflow-creator-maxime-beauchemin) Maxime Beauchemin, creator of Airflow and Superset, shares how he uses AI agents for data engineering: orchestrating agents on a shared canvas with Agor, context layers and semantics, Okta for Agents security, and automating CEO work with AI assistants. [2026/07/15 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-july-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter : July 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-july-2026) July's DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: a portable R2 + DuckLake analytics stack, why PostHog rebuilt on DuckDB over ClickHouse, DuckCon #7 and the 1.5.4 / 1.4.5 releases, a SedonaDB WASM build for spatial SQL in the browser, and more. [2026/06/12 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-june-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter : June 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-june-2026) The June 2026 DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter: a local-first ETL/ELT studio, the Quack client-server protocol and its OAuth layer, DuckLake inlining, DuckDB internals, MotherDuck Flights for agent-native ingest, plus a community spotlight on Ryan Dolley. [2026/06/05 - Simon Späti](/blog/vibe-coding-dangerous-agentic-engineering-wes-mckinney/) ### [Vibe Coding Is Dangerous, Agentic Engineering Isn't ft. Wes McKinney](/blog/vibe-coding-dangerous-agentic-engineering-wes-mckinney) Wes McKinney, creator of pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow, shares how he works with AI coding agents: spec-driven workflows with superpowers, continuous AI code review with Roborev, token economics, and why vibe coding is dangerous but agentic engineering isn't. [2026/05/21 - Simon Späti](/blog/cost-as-tokens-substrait-llm-chris-riccomini/) ### [Plan Mode All the Time, Substrait over SQL, and the End of the DE Role ft. Chris Riccomini](/blog/cost-as-tokens-substrait-llm-chris-riccomini) Chris Riccomini on using AI for data engineering: correctness in financial data, why LLMs should speak Substrait over SQL, the Ralph Loop for context management, security with 'Okta for Agents', and the future of the data engineer role. [2026/05/11 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-may-2026/) ### [DuckDB Monthly #41: DuckDB internals course, FTS walkthrough, and a satellite pipeline with H3 + Parquet](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-may-2026) DuckDB Monthly #41: Torsten's 15-week DuckDB internals course, Pete's full-text search walkthrough on a multi-GB email corpus, Mark's GCAT satellite pipeline with H3, plus column-level lineage with duck_lineage and DuckLake v1.0. [2026/04/24 - Simon Späti](/blog/internal-vs-external-storage-whats-the-limit-of-external-tables/) ### [Internal vs. External Storage: What's the Limit of External Tables?](/blog/internal-vs-external-storage-whats-the-limit-of-external-tables) 25 years of external tables, from Oracle 9i to DuckLake. When to use internal storage vs. external tables, why they keep getting re-added to every major data warehouse, and a benchmark showing the speed tax for cold data. [2026/04/17 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-april-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter : April 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-april-2026) DuckLake 1.0 ships, Lance adds vector search, Rust-native extension [2026/03/27 - Simon Späti](/blog/specs-over-vibes-consistent-ai-results/) ### [Specs Over Vibes: Consistent AI Results ft. Mark Freeman](/blog/specs-over-vibes-consistent-ai-results) Mark Freeman, Head of DevRel at Gable, shares his Spec-Driven Development workflow for producing high-quality, reproducible AI outcomes using Claude Code, ExcaliDraw diagrams, JSON schemas, and agent teams with tmux. [2026/03/13 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-march-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter – March 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-march-2026) SQL Transpilers, VS Code Extensions, Dives and more [2026/02/24 - Simon Späti](/blog/git-for-data-part-2/) ### [Git for Data Applied: Comparing Git-like Tools That Separate Metadata from Data](/blog/git-for-data-part-2) Comparing Git-like Tools That Separate Metadata from Data [2026/02/11 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-february-2026/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem Newsletter – February 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-february-2026) MSSQL Extension, Vortex File Format & 2TB Memory Benchmarks [2026/02/05 - Simon Späti](/blog/obsidian-rag-duckdb-motherduck/) ### [Building an Obsidian RAG with DuckDB and MotherDuck](/blog/obsidian-rag-duckdb-motherduck) Build a local-first RAG for your Obsidian notes using DuckDB's vector search, then deploy it as a serverless web app with MotherDuck [2026/01/17 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-january-2026/) ### [This Month in the DuckDB Ecosystem: January 2026](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-january-2026) DuckDB news: Iceberg extension adds full DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE). Process 1TB in 30 seconds. Query data via AI agents with MCP server. TypeScript macros for APIs. [2025/12/10 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-december-2025/) ### [This Month in the DuckDB Ecosystem: December 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-december-2025) DuckDB news: v1.4 adds AES-256 encryption. DuckLake brings ACID-compliant lakehouse with time-travel queries. Gaggle extension queries Kaggle datasets directly via SQL. [2025/12/03 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-olap-caching/) ### [Simplicity of a Database, but the Speed of a Cache: OLAP Caches for DuckDB](/blog/duckdb-olap-caching) Speed up slow dashboards without adding new infrastructure. Learn how DuckDB's caching extensions can drop query times from minutes to seconds. [2025/11/24 - Simon Späti](/blog/git-for-data-part-1/) ### [Branch, Test, Deploy: A Git-Inspired Approach for Data](/blog/git-for-data-part-1) This article explores how to bring Git style workflows like branching, testing, and deploying to your data stack. Learn how concepts like zero copy cloning and metadata pointers can finally give you isolated test environments. [2025/11/12 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-november-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: November 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-november-2025) DuckDB news: QuackStore caching cuts query time from 49s to 3s. Infera runs ONNX ML models in SQL. 127 community extensions analyzed. DuckLake architecture explained. [2025/10/30 - Simon Späti](/blog/data-engineers-answer-10-top-reddit-questions/) ### [4 Senior Data Engineers Answer 10 Top Reddit Questions](/blog/data-engineers-answer-10-top-reddit-questions) A great panel answering the most voted/commented data questions on Reddit [2025/10/07 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-october-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: October 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-october-2025) DuckDB news: v1.4.0 LTS brings AES-256 encryption, MERGE statements, and Iceberg writes. 100x faster than Spark on local Parquet. Official Docker images released. [2025/09/09 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-september-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: September 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-september-2025) DuckDB news: Spatial joins 58x faster via R-tree indexing. pg_duckdb 1.0 adds OLAP analytics to PostgreSQL. One team cut Snowflake costs 79% using DuckDB caching. [2025/08/19 - Simon Späti](/blog/semantic-layer-duckdb-tutorial/) ### [Why Semantic Layers Matter — and How to Build One with DuckDB](/blog/semantic-layer-duckdb-tutorial) Learn what a semantic layer is, why it matters, and how to build a simple one with DuckDB and Ibis using just YAML and Python [2025/08/07 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-august-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: August 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-august-2025) DuckDB news: 50.7% YoY developer growth. DuckLake v0.2 adds credential secrets. BigQuery extension hits 21.7k weekly downloads. Vector search enables RAG applications. [2025/07/21 - Simon Späti](/blog/summer-data-engineering-roadmap/) ### [Summer Data Engineering Roadmap](/blog/summer-data-engineering-roadmap) A comprehensive 3-week structured roadmap for learning data engineering fundamentals, from SQL and Git basics to advanced topics like streaming, data quality, and DevOps.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses. [2025/07/08 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-july-2025/) ### [This Month in the DuckDB Ecosystem: July 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-july-2025) DuckDB news: Tributary streams Kafka data to SQL queries. SQLRooms enables browser analytics via DuckDB-WASM. pg_duckdb benchmarks show 1,500x TPC-DS speedup. [2025/07/03 - Simon Späti](/blog/data-engineering-toolkit-infrastructure-devops/) ### [Data Engineering Tools & Platforms: DevOps & CI/CD Practices in 2026](/blog/data-engineering-toolkit-infrastructure-devops) Explore the top data engineering tools and platforms of 2026. This guide details the essential DevOps tools, CI/CD practices, and infrastructure needed to build a modern, scalable data platform. [2025/06/06 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-june-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: June 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-june-2025) DuckDB news: DuckLake combines catalog and table format with ACID metadata in SQL. Radio extension adds WebSocket and Redis Pub/Sub. Top CSV benchmark results. [2025/05/23 - Simon Späti](/blog/open-lakehouse-stack-duckdb-table-formats/) ### [The Open Lakehouse Stack: DuckDB and the Rise of Table Formats](/blog/open-lakehouse-stack-duckdb-table-formats) Learn how DuckDB and open table formats like Iceberg power a fast, composable analytics stack on affordable cloud storage [2025/05/08 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-may-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: May 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-may-2025) DuckDB news: Metabase driver queries Parquet files directly. FlockMTL integrates LLMs into SQL workflows. Doom clone runs in DuckDB-WASM. Spatial wins top honors. [2025/04/18 - Simon Späti](/blog/json-log-analysis-duckdb-motherduck/) ### [The Data Engineer's Guide to Efficient Log Parsing with DuckDB/MotherDuck](/blog/json-log-analysis-duckdb-motherduck) How to Query JSON and Log Files with SQL Using DuckDB and MotherDuck [2025/04/05 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-april-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: April 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-april-2025) DuckDB news: Streaming support with new remote file caching. Community extensions expand real-time analytics. Event-driven processing patterns for data pipelines. [2025/03/28 - Simon Späti](/blog/vector-technologies-ai-data-stack/) ### [Vector Technologies for AI: Extending Your Existing Data Stack](/blog/vector-technologies-ai-data-stack) Understand when to use a vector database and how it differs from vector search engines. [2025/03/07 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-march-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: March 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-march-2025) DuckDB news: v1.2 adds Google Sheets extension for SQL on spreadsheets. Duckberg queries Iceberg tables via Python. Smallpond sorts 110TB in 30 min using Ray. [2025/02/26 - Simon Späti](/blog/geospatial-for-beginner-duckdb-spatial-motherduck/) ### [A Beginner’s Guide to Geospatial with DuckDB Spatial and MotherDuck](/blog/geospatial-for-beginner-duckdb-spatial-motherduck) Unlock the power of geospatial analysis with DuckDB Spatial and MotherDuck, making location-based data processing faster, simpler, and more accessible for data engineers. [2025/02/09 - Simon Späti](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-february-2025/) ### [DuckDB Ecosystem: February 2025](/blog/duckdb-ecosystem-newsletter-february-2025) DuckDB news: DuckCon #6 runs TPC-H SF300 on Raspberry Pi. SQL/PGQ graph queries 10-100x faster than Neo4j. Arrow Flight enables concurrent read/write access. ## SUBSCRIBE ### Subscribe to MotherDuck Blog Also subscribe to other MotherDuck updates Submit