Announcing MotherDuck General Availability: Data Warehousing with DuckDB at Scale

Production-ready DuckDB

Just last week, DuckDB Labs announced that DuckDB has reached 1.0.0 and is now committed to backwards compatibility. In our post congratulating the DuckDB team, we outlined why database nerds love DuckDB: performance, innovation velocity, versatility, ease of use, rich and user-friendly SQL, and extreme portability. Thanks to DuckDB, analytics can run virtually anywhere, liberated from the shackles of complex and expensive distributed systems. As an embedded database, it’s the perfect ‘Lego’ building block that can snap into any process just by linking in a library. These same characteristics led us to build a cloud data warehouse on top of DuckDB and in collaboration with the creators.

Simple, Multiplayer at Scale

MotherDuck makes it simple to start uploading and querying your data, whether it sits on your local machine, in blob storage or even on the web. The data can be in many different formats, including parquet, csv, json, Iceberg and Delta Lake. Your local DuckDB can work seamlessly with MotherDuck using Dual Execution, with parts of your queries running locally and other parts scaling to the cloud.

The cloud creates unique opportunities for sharing data. MotherDuck allows you to upload your data and share a named snapshot with your colleagues in two lines of SQL. Although snapshots can be very useful to have a consistent view of your data across the team for tasks like building machine learning models, snapshots can also be automatically updated. Now with MotherDuck GA, shares can be restricted to your organization and easily discoverable.

A cloud data warehouse needs to scale for all your users and applications. MotherDuck eliminates fighting over common resources by assigning separate, isolated compute instances to each user and simplifying administration and costs for organizations. These compute instances individually scale up to handle workloads of many terabytes for some of our customers. They also scale down to zero when they’re not being used, so you don’t pay when you’re not actively running queries.

Unmatched Efficiency of Pricing and Execution

Customers have frequently referenced high costs for status-quo cloud data warehouses as a big concern. Because of the efficiency of DuckDB’s query engine and MotherDuck’s scale-up architecture, we’re able to offer pricing that is often an order of magnitude lower than other alternatives

Not only is the pricing competitive, but it’s also fine-grained and efficient. By billing at second-level granularity, you only pay for the cloud CPU time you actually use. And, when we’re able to take advantage of your local compute through Dual Execution, you don’t pay at all.

“With MotherDuck working to solve amazing problems through data, our behaviors have changed because we know we don't have to pay enormous costs every time we run a query, so we've got almost limitless performance,” said Ravi Chandra, Chief Technology Officer at Dexibit.

Backed by a World-Class Team

The team building MotherDuck hails from some of the top companies in data: Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, SingleStore and more. We’re united by shared values and a shared mission to make analytics ducking awesome.

Our friends at Looker were known to have the best customer success organization in the data industry: the Department of Customer Love, founded by Margaret Rosas. Margaret has joined us at MotherDuck to lead our customer success team, the Hatchery, where our customers are nurtured and taught to fly.

As we go GA, we also wanted to consolidate engineering under a single leader who can help us scale the team. ​​We’ve asked Frances Perry to lead our engineering organization. Frances came to us from Google where she was an engineering director on Google Compute Engine, built Google’s internal data processing infrastructure and also released that infrastructure to the world as Cloud Dataflow.

Now SOC 2 Certified

We know that trust and security are critical as you choose a data warehouse to power your business. We leverage a defense in-depth strategy, maintain operational security processes, and build customer trust through certified auditor attestations.

MotherDuck successfully underwent an audit for SOC 2 Type I, which evaluates our systems relevant to security, availability, and confidentiality. With this attestation completed, we have a Type II planned for later in 2024.

To continue strengthening internal processes and controls, Myoung Kang has joined the company full-time as Head of Operations. Myoung is a renowned startup veteran who has worked for many companies, including Notion, Convex, and Preset where she was interim CFO.

Expanded Modern Duck Stack

MotherDuck partners with more than 50 leading companies and technologies to make the Modern Duck Stack. Alongside MotherDuck GA, we’re excited to announce that some of the most requested BI, data integration and data observability tools have been added to the flock.

• Tableau: 60,000 companies globally rely on Tableau (part of Salesforce) for data visualization. Tableau Desktop and Server now support MotherDuck, with Tableau Cloud support coming later this year. The connector can be easily found on the Tableau Exchange
• PowerBI: 5 million organizations worldwide use Microsoft Power BI for data visualization, including 97% of Fortune 500. The MotherDuck connector for Power BI is officially launched, and MotherDuck has been accepted to the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub program
• Fivetran: Fivetran is the leader in data integration for the modern data stack, powering 5,000 customers. The MotherDuck destination connector was developed in close collaboration with the Fivetran engineering team, and is now an official Fivetran destination.
• Monte Carlo: Monte Carlo, the leader in data observability, has built a MotherDuck integration. It allows our customers to monitor their databases and look for anomalies through custom SQL rules, which can be created in either the UI wizard and/or programmatically via monitors as code.

New Startup Program with $10k in Credits

MotherDuck has partnered with leading VC firms to offer $10k in credits to eligible startups in need of a data warehouse or backend for their data apps. Early stage startups with up to 300 employees and less than $100M in funding can submit a short application.

Take Flight with MotherDuck - Now GA

If you don’t already have a MotherDuck account, visit app.motherduck.com to get started. We have a fully-featured 30-day free trial of the Standard Plan and a forever Free Plan available for ongoing usage.

“Our data pipelines used to take eight hours. Now they're taking eight minutes, and I see a world where they take eight seconds. This is why we made the big bet on DuckDB and MotherDuck. It's only possible with DuckDB and MotherDuck,” said Jim O'Neill, Co-founder and CTO at FinQore.

If you’re not quite ready to get started, you can learn more about the product, browse our docs, and read about how FinQore, Dexibit and Mosaic use MotherDuck.

We also have an upcoming live demo and discussion on Tuesday, June 18th at 10am Pacific.

Lastly, if you’re in San Francisco, join us to celebrate tonight at our MotherDuck’ing Party happening alongside the Data + AI Summit.