- 3 min read
BYWe're launching commercial support for open-source DuckDB deployments, so every organization can get the power of a modern data engine, with direct access to database experts.
About once a week, somebody tells me a version of the same story. They've built something really cool on DuckDB! Maybe it’s an embedded analytics feature, a data app, a backend for some insane data wrangling job. It's fast, it's simple, they love it. And then they say, a little sheepishly, “Well… it’s working now, but it feels like it’s going to break eventually”.
This was a big part of the reason MotherDuck was built in the first place. The team saw the power of DuckDB, just like all of you did. And we wanted as many people in the world to be able to take advantage of it. But, hosted software isn’t an option for everyone, whether that’s because of regulatory requirements or operational constraints.
As of today, if you're running open-source DuckDB in production, you can buy support for it from MotherDuck. This includes SLA'd response times, architecture reviews and guidance, and help optimizing DuckDB for your workloads. You get direct access to database experts on the MotherDuck team, aka the people who have seen hundreds of DuckDB deployments, built technology that runs millions of DuckDB instances weekly, and understand both the core technology and how to run DuckDB reliably at scale.
In practice, this looks like people who can help you answer questions like:
“We love DuckDB and want to push it even further.” We help you architect for scale.
“Our DuckDB queries are running slower than expected.” We tune it, drawing on our experience with hundreds (if not thousands) of DuckDB implementations
“Should we upgrade from v0.8 to v1.0? How? What breaks if we do?” We validate it against your data, test compatibility, and help you mitigate any risk.
“A query that worked last week now fails. What do I do?” We investigate, engage with DuckDB's team if needed, and get you a fix.
We’re big believers in open source here at MotherDuck. After all, the foundation of our own product is open source DuckDB. We are proud to support the open source community and sit on the advisory board of the DuckDB Foundation. We think that open source is amazing… and that open source at scale with reliability guarantees is even better.
Companies pay for support once their data infrastructure stops being optional, once downtime has a real consequence, and once they'd rather have an expert on call than reconstruct tribal knowledge from Stack Overflow answers written for a different version of the software. In our experience, this is:
If any of these sound like you, we’d love to talk.
If you want to learn more about DuckDB, the DuckDB Foundation has some great resources.
Are you a DuckDB use who wants to learn more about MotherDuck's cloud platform instead? Start here.
2026/09/02 - Alex Monahan
We analyzed a slice of MotherDuck query history and found agents ran 29 times more queries than humans last month, a gap that has roughly doubled every month. The average organization now has twice as many agents as human users. Agents are the dominant consumers of the data platform, and our systems can't afford to stay the same.
2026/09/10 - Mehdi Ouazza
DuckDB 2.0 alpha vs 1.5.5 on one laptop: recursive CTEs up to 90x, VARIANT 6x faster than JSON text, async I/O 2.4x on S3. What changes, and how to model data to get the speedup.
