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Comment by smithclay

3 hours ago

Don't think it's widely known or understood, but Ducklake doesn't require duckdb: it's just a (good) data lake spec that works in duckdb.

There's a cool alternate rust/datafusion ecosystem initiative going on at https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake, and think the Quack protocol opens up a lot of cool possibilities too.

If you need an idea for what do do with ducklake: recommend throwing all of your agent traces in it.

Thanks for the shoutout.

For context, we previously built custom catalogs optimized for specific use cases. But they were hard to maintain, especially as requirements changed, and Apache Iceberg was too heavy for our specific low-latency work.

Since Ducklake is only a spec, we implemented datafusion-ducklake, and it performs as well as any custom or specialized catalog we built. We use Postgres as the catalog store, and it does not get much simpler than that: a transactional database for transactional data.

Plus, it gives us a clear spec for implementing complex parts like time travel, snapshots, etc.

It's been a godsend.

We welcome and encourage contributors!