This Month in the DuckDB Ecosystem: January 2024

2024/01/30

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Hey, friend 👋

The last issue was the end of an era - Marcos has retired from writing the DuckDB Ecosystem Monthly newsletter. We're all enormously grateful for his contributions over the last year+.

This is Ryan from MotherDuck. Don't worry, we'll keep this newsletter going monthly with help from the community!

I want to highlight a fantastic trend I've seen, having recently returned from Data Day Texas - a vibrant community built and supported by Lynn Bender and Alex Law. The data community is full of amazing humans who not only care about how vectorized columnar execution works in practice, but also care sincerely about how they're impacting their fellow humans and the business. This is in contrast to some other tech communities and was best demonstrated by the accolades heard throughout the halls for a talk by Sol Rashidi on lessons learned as she moved from being a practitioner to an executive.

Let's keep building this amazing community and technologies, while supporting each other and the needs of the business.

As always, this is a two-way conversation: if you have any feedback on this newsletter, feel free to send us an email to duckdbnews@motherduck.com

Cheers!
-Ryan

Featured Community Member

Mihai Bojin & Marcelo Cenerino

Mihai and Marcelo , both with over 15 years in tech, have made their mark in the industry. Mihai, with a background as a technical leader at big names like Salesforce, MongoDB, and now Google. Marcelo's career is equally luminous, having contributed his expertise to giants such as Ericsson and Workday, and now excelling as a Staff Software Engineer at Google. Interestingly, they're both located in Dublin. But there's more that brings them together. They successfully hosted Dublin's first DuckDB meetup! Keep an eye on their event page for upcoming meetups!

Top DuckDB Links this Month

SQL for Google Sheets with DuckDB

DuckDB is winning largely because of developer experience. This tiny article from Daniel Palma shares how to access a Google Sheet from DuckDB in one line of code.

Monte Carlo simulations talk

Monte Carlo simulations do repeated random sampling to determine the probability of a complex result. James McNeil recently gave a talk to the Dublin DuckDB Meetup on doing these simulations with DuckDB.

Multi-Database support in DuckDB

Want to join DuckDB tables with tables in Postgres, SQLite, and MySQL? You can! And you can even copy data between databases easily in single SQL statements. Learn more from Mark Raasveldt on the DuckDB blog.

ERPL DuckDB Extension for SAP data

DuckDB has definitely reached the enterprise! Simon Müller has released a DuckDB extension for using SAP Data in your workloads.

Excel support for Parquet files (via DuckDB)

From the same author as the SAP extension, we have a post on how to use Parquet data in the world’s most ubiquitous “database” using DuckDB.

Streamlit, IBIS, DuckDB and more

Want to power a dashboard deployed as an app on Streamlit? Cody Peterson of Voltron Data shows us how in this great step-by-step tutorial.

Dplyr and DucKDB

Dplyr provides a grammar for data transformation that’s higher level than SQL and consistent across data sources. Data Scientist Bilikisu Olatunji dives into how to use Dplyr with DuckDB in R.

Quack & Code on WASM DuckDB

One of the most exciting reasons to use DuckDB is that it runs anywhere, including inside the modern web browser using web assembly (WASM). Previous featured community member Christophe Blefari quacks and codes WASM with MotherDuck’s Mehdi Ouazza in this episode.

Small Data, Big Impact talk on MLOps Community

Do you like to drink stale coffee? Demetrios Brinkmann brings on Hannes Mühleisen and Jordan Tigani to talk about this question, building an empathetic developer experience, open source business models and more.

CIDR paper on Hybrid Query Processing

One of the most popular pages on the MotherDuck website focuses on the hybrid system architecture. Peter Boncz, Visiting Researcher at MotherDuck and database luminary, corralled the MotherDuck team to dive into the details in this peer-reviewed article recently presented at the CIDR conference.

DuckDB: the Rising Star in the Big Data landscape

Mihai discussed why DuckDB has been popular recently and why, you should care about it in case you haven’t already ;-)

Upcoming Events

SQL IDE Safari: Harlequin in your terminal

31 January 2024 | Online 🌐

This latest episode of Quack and Code stars Ted Conbeer who built an amazing SQL IDE that runs in your terminal.

DuckCon #4 by DuckDB Labs and Foundation

2 February 2024 | Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱

The event will begin with a talk by DuckDB's creators, Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, discussing DuckDB's current state and the upcoming release of version 1.0, followed by presentations from two DuckDB users. Additionally, there will be a series of lightning talks from the DuckDB community.

Chill Data Summmit

06 February 2024 | Online 🌐

Ryan Boyd of MotherDuck will give a talk on "Data infrastructure through the lens of scale, performance and usability," and will demo how Iceberg works in DuckDB for accessing data in your lakehouse.