MotherDuck By The Bay
- Oli Dinov
- Aug 14
- 2 min read
We’re especially happy to welcome MotherDuck as a Sustaining Partner at this year’s AI by the Bay. Our theme is simple: make serious analytics feel effortless. MotherDuck fits that spirit perfectly—bringing DuckDB’s beloved, local-first speed into the cloud without losing the lightness that made it popular in the first place.
So what is MotherDuck, really?
MotherDuck launched in 2022, founded by Jordan Tigani and a crew of data veterans who helped create the modern analytics stack. Their mission: keep the delightful DuckDB developer experience, add cloud pragmatism, and make production analytics feel as simple as a notebook.
MotherDuck is a cloud-native analytics service built on DuckDB. It preserves the local-first DuckDB workflow while adding:
Dual Execution: Run a single query across your laptop and the cloud—combine local Parquet with datasets in MotherDuck or object storage without changing tools.
A managed control plane: Identity and access, sharing, observability, and a streamlined web UI.
Security & compliance: SOC 2 Type II attestation and GDPR support for business analytics.
DuckLake (preview): An open table format designed with the DuckDB creators for snapshotting and time travel, so analyses are versioned and reproducible.
DuckDB and the MotherDuck Revolution
DuckDB put serious analytic performance in-process—right next to your code—so many workloads don’t need sprawling, distributed clusters. MotherDuck hosts that experience: the familiar DuckDB workflow, now with a managed cloud service and streamlined web UI. The appeal is straightforward: developer-friendly, scalable analytics without the Hadoop-era maze.
With DuckDB + MotherDuck, you get:
In-process analytic power for real OLAP work.
Less ops, more results—many jobs run great without massive clusters.
A modern path to scale that focuses on code and SQL, not cluster choreography.
MotherDuck doesn’t just ship features—it invests in its community. Their events favor hands-on demos and open conversations over canned keynotes, with a welcoming vibe that still keeps the bar high. It’s the same builder crowd that helped create open-source analytics and cloud infrastructure, now bringing fresh ideas and hard-won lessons to a leaner, faster era.
This year, we are hosting a keynote by Ryan Boyd. Ryan started his career as a software engineer, but since has led DevRel teams for 15+ years at Google, Databricks and Neo4j, where he developed and executed numerous marketing and DevRel programs. Details will be announced soon!
But this is not the first appearance of MotherDuck by the Bay. Our friendship builds directly on the momentum from 2023.
Alex Monahan, Customer Software Engineer at MotherDuck, walked us through “In-Process Analytical Data Management with DuckDB,” showing how DuckDB’s in-process design delivers complex SQL, automatic parallelization, efficient operators, out-of-core execution for larger-than-RAM datasets, and virtually zero data-movement overhead from host languages like Python and R (right down to querying Pandas DataFrames directly or even running in the browser via WebAssembly).
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