MotherDuck Now Speaks Postgres: Fast Analytics Without Changing Your Stack

The Postgres endpoint is a translation layer that lets MotherDuck speak the PostgreSQL wire protocol. You connect with any Postgres-compatible driver like node-postgres, JDBC, or rust-postgres, and MotherDuck handles the type and metadata conversion. Queries still run on MotherDuck's server-side DuckDB instances, so you get DuckDB performance without replacing your existing Postgres tooling.

Yes. Popular drivers like node-postgres, JDBC, rust-postgres, and psycopg all work with the endpoint. You point your client at pg.<region>.motherduck.com on port 5432, use your MotherDuck token as the password, and connect over SSL. The wire protocol is Postgres, but the SQL dialect is DuckDB's, which is mostly compatible with Postgres SQL and has some of its own extensions.

Not yet. dbt support through the Postgres endpoint is actively in development. In the meantime, you can use dbt with MotherDuck through the dbt-duckdb adapter, which connects via the DuckDB client.

Use a connection pool the same way you would with a real Postgres database. Initial connections take a few hundred milliseconds for the TCP and TLS handshake and token authentication, so reusing pooled connections removes that overhead on subsequent queries. A pool size of 10 is reasonable for most applications; 100 covers higher-scale workloads. There is no hard connection limit, but standard Postgres pooling best practices apply.

Use the Postgres endpoint when you're building customer-facing applications, connecting BI tools, or running in serverless environments like Cloudflare Workers or Vercel that can't load native DuckDB libraries. Use the DuckDB client for exploratory analysis, bulk data ingestion using the Appender API, or when you want DuckDB-Wasm in the browser for ultra-low-latency interactions.