Tech Challenges of Startups – DuckDB’s Rapid Analytics Database System

Every year, dozens of tech start-ups start in the low countries that have big dreams, but have to overcome technical hurdles to make them come true. In this article, we discuss what DuckDB Labs encountered while developing its database management system.

Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt have been working on all kinds of database management systems for about ten years at the CWI research group Database Architectures. In this way, over the years, they have acquired a good idea of ​​what is currently available. They discovered a gap in the market for data management software, specifically for data science. A database normally runs on a separate system, while the user is talking to that database on another computer; a client-server connection. For most use cases it works fine, but for data science applications it works terribly. According to the CWI researchers, you then have to wait a long time for the data to be transferred between the database and your application.