The DuckDB team has released DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS, codenamed "Cinnamon Teal" after the Spatula cyanoptera, a reddish-brown duck found in the western Americas. The release is built from close to 20,000 commits since DuckDB 1.5 and is described as the project's biggest feature release so far. While DuckDB 1.0 focused on stability and backward compatibility, DuckDB 2.0 is above all a feature release.
The highlights include a polished version of the Quack protocol, asynchronous I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, agent mode, triggers, and an extensible SQL parser. Quack, introduced in DuckDB 1.5.3, lets DuckDB run in a traditional client-server setup, and the new CONNECT statement lets users attach to and switch to a remote database in a single command. The command-line interface also gains -serve and -connect arguments for setting up a Quack server or client directly.
Performance improvements include asynchronous I/O for reading Parquet and CSV files, which lets the I/O layer scale independently from query execution. The new remote pushdown optimizer sends queries directly to remote servers such as PostgreSQL and MySQL instead of pulling tables over the wire.
DuckDB 2.0 is a long-term support release, supported until at least October 2027. The previous LTS release, version 1.4, remains supported until late November 2026, and version 1.5 has been extended to March 2027. Some client libraries and extensions may take a few days longer to become available.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing