Collaboration with Hydra and DuckDB Labs can provide dramatic performance improvements for analytical queries in PostgreSQL
MotherDuck, in collaboration with Hydra and DuckDB Labs, announced the beta release of pg_duckdb, a PostgreSQL extension that integrates DuckDB’s analytics engine directly into PostgreSQL. This extension enables organizations to run rapid analytical queries alongside traditional transactional workloads without changing their existing PostgreSQL infrastructure, delivering up to 1500x performance improvements for certain analytical queries and a more realistic 10x improvement for many other queries.
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pg_duckdb allows companies to run rapid analytical queries alongside traditional transactional workloads
The pg_duckdb extension addresses a critical challenge faced by PostgreSQL users who need to perform analytics on their transactional data. By bringing DuckDB’s analytical capabilities directly into PostgreSQL, organizations can now:
- Execute complex analytical queries up to 1500x faster than native PostgreSQL
- Query data directly from Data Lakes and Lakehouses, including AWS S3
- Seamlessly work with columnar file formats like Parquet and Iceberg
- Scale analytics workloads using MotherDuck’s cloud resources
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“PostgreSQL excels at transactional workloads but wasn’t specifically designed for analytics,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO and Co-Founder of MotherDuck. “With pg_duckdb, we’re bringing DuckDB’s analytical prowess directly to PostgreSQL users, allowing them to dramatically improve query performance without changing how their data is stored or updated.”
Real-World Performance
Initial testing demonstrates remarkable performance improvements. Using the TPC-DS benchmark suite, a query that took 81.8 seconds in native PostgreSQL completed in just 52 milliseconds using pg_duckdb – a 1500x improvement. When scaled to larger datasets on production hardware, the same query showed even more dramatic results, reducing execution time from over 2 hours to approximately 400 milliseconds.
What’s Next
While pg_duckdb is currently in beta, the development team is actively working on additional features and improvements. Users can track upcoming developments and provide feedback through the project’s GitHub repository.
To start using pg_duckdb, users can access the pre-built Docker image or follow the installation instructions in the repository’s README.
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