Microsoft has entered the final phase of retiring Azure SQL Data Sync, blocking new deployments in subscriptions that have never used the service. The restriction took effect on September 9, ahead of the service's shutdown on September 30, 2027. Subscriptions that already use the service can continue creating, modifying, and managing sync groups and member databases until retirement. Other subscriptions can no longer adopt it. The service uses a hub-and-spoke model, with an Azure SQL database serving as the hub and other databases joining its synchronization group. Members can be other Azure SQL databases or on-premises SQL Server databases, which require a sync agent. A conflict resolution policy determines whether the hub or member database takes precedence when changes clash. SQL Data Sync supports scenarios including hybrid environments, in which applications and databases are split between local infrastructure and Azure, as well as geographically distributed applications. Microsoft acknowledged that customers will need to choose among several possible replacements. It offered little technical explanation for the retirement, referring only to evolving "operational, security, and compliance requirements." Microsoft announced the retirement two years ago, but blocking first-time deployments gives customers another reason to begin planning their transition. Microsoft lists alternatives including Azure Data Factory, Azure Functions, read replicas, linked servers, database mirroring, availability groups, and transactional replication. However, it noted that "there is no single replacement that maps to every SQL Data Sync configuration." Existing users have just over a year to migrate before the final cutoff. Those without a migration plan will need one before the service shuts down. ®

PostgreSQL 19 is set to add standardized SQL syntax for querying property graphs. The open source database has steadily grown in popularity over the last five years, becoming the most popular among developers for the first time in 2023. Speaking to The Register, Alastair Turner, PostgreSQL evangelist at open source consultancy Percona, said the property graph query support in PostgreSQL 19 – due later this month or early October – resulted from collaboration among several of the database's largest contributors. Graph databases store data as nodes, relationships, and properties rather than tables or documents. They have advantages for certain workloads, but adopting one can mean adding another DBMS to the technology stack. The relational database has been acquiring graph query capabilities for some time, but PostgreSQL 19 is set to go further, Turner explained. "All the rest of it has sort of been done through Object Relational Mapping over the top. This is actually baked-in graph syntax. It comes from the SQL 2023 standard." Turner said the implementation was "very heavily influenced" by some of the engineers behind OpenCypher, the open source query language for graph databases. The work also involved PostgreSQL committers who sit on the SQL standards committee. "This is one of the most interesting developments because it's one of the big multi-vendor collaborations. There was lots of coding and review work across quite a few of the big contributors," he said. The new capability implements SQL/PGQ, which became part of the SQL standard in 2023. "It's on the right path," Turner said. "The SQL community and the PostgreSQL community are going to try to optimize everything." However, he added that the implementation "still needs one or two additional syntax features" before it can displace dedicated graph databases for a significant number of workloads. Turner said: "The current implementation creates queries across node-edge graphs to satisfy those requests. So some of them perform very well. What's going to have to happen in the next iteration or two is that indexing add-ons catch up to improve the performance." ®

Last week, AWS bought DuckLabs, the people behind the open source OLAP system DuckDB. Since the cloud giant already owns a data warehouse – in Redshift – and it doesn’t get the DuckDB intellectual property (it remains open source), then why would it bother? Andy Warfield, AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer, argued the acquisition is a major plank of AWS’s thinking when it considers the future of application building, data, and analytics. “Half of why DuckDB is perceived as being valuable is as this kind of connective tissue layer across existing data processing tools,” he told The Register. Written in C++, DuckDB is embedded within a host process. There is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain. It runs in the host application's memory space with queries executing directly within the process. As such, developers can build analytics inside their applications, but Warfield said the design means developers and data engineers have new ways of connecting data sources and processing engines. For example, DuckDB employs verbs in SQL such as "attach" and "connect" that allow it to work with almost any remote SQL endpoint. Warfield said DuckDB is already capable of connecting to Redshift or RDS, issuing SQL commands, and performing cross-engine interactions. “In a lot of senses, we can treat it as [being] like an SDK for data that customers can build with, and they can run the large proportion of their queries that are small, and work over smaller data sets locally without having to stand up an external engine. Yet, as they graduate to work with larger datasets, or need centralized query capabilities, they can still use DuckDB as a way of passing those queries on to those other engines,” he said. The concept applies to analytics and data systems from other vendors — such as Google’s BigQuery and Microsoft’s Fabric — as much as AWS’s own products. “You can build with Duck, and it provides the path to graduate and to submit inquiries against something else, like a singular interface for data,” he said. AWS acquired DuckLabs, the support and development company founded by DuckDB developers Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, both academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center. The database itself will remain open source under the MIT License. Led by Mühleisen and Raasveldt, the DuckDB Foundation will remain an independent non-profit organization setting the strategic direction of database development. The governance of that Foundation is expected to change to include a broader spectrum of contributors as a result of the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs. Andy Pavlo, VP of Research at ClickHouse Labs and professor of Databaseology at Carnegie Mellon University, said the AWS acquisition of DuckLabs would be a positive change for DuckDB. “Hannes and Mark did it their way from the very beginning. They eschewed VC money in 2020 and just focused on building a database system that solved real problems for people. I don't see them changing the long-term direction of the open source project.” The benefit of AWS money would come in providing funding to bring new ideas to reality. “The cost of DBMS development has increased greatly in the last few years. It's not just the cost of humans working on the software, but also the agents that run tests, write code, review pull requests, and handle other system administrative tasks. Since agents are writing code faster than humans, that means more CI/CD infrastructure costs. Amazon will provide DuckDB resources to keep pace with modern DBMS development practices and scale their efforts.” But AWS is not the only company betting on the founding principles of DuckDB. Former Google BigQuery engineer Jordan Tigani co-founded MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on the database, and is a regular contributor to the DuckDB project. In 2023, it gobbled up $52 million in VC money. “Of course I'm nervous about the acquisition. Anyone with a stake in the DuckDB ecosystem is going to be nervous when a hyperscaler comes in and acquires the team behind the technology,” Tigani told The Register. But he added that there would also be positive outcomes for people who care about DuckDB because the resources behind its development would increase. “Open Source DuckDB is likely going to go faster. Yes, for that to happen you'd have to believe that Amazon isn't going to meddle too much and break things, but I have a lot of faith in Hannes and Mark.” In terms of the tech build around DuckDB, MotherDuck has a four-year head-start, he said. “We have built an amazing product that goes beyond just cloud-hosted DuckDB. We have developed expertise running DuckDB at scale and as critical infrastructure.” If DuckDB remains true to its open-source principles, others can do the same. ®

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, the fast-growing open-source database that has become a favorite of developers looking to analyze large amounts of data without the cost and setup of a cloud data warehouse.

Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project’s technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects.

Amazon says it is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself. DuckDB will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, as will the related DuckLake and Quack projects, according to DuckLabs.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September.

Larger shifts in cloud data

The deal fits Amazon’s broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it. It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage.

The move comes as the data industry shifts toward keeping information in open formats in cloud storage, where it can be queried directly rather than loaded into a separate warehouse.

The shift puts pressure on companies like Snowflake and Databricks, which sell the compute and governance layer on top of stored data. Both are major AWS partners as well as competitors, with large numbers of customers running on Amazon’s cloud.

AI has raised the stakes, driving up both the volume of data companies keep in the cloud and the cost of analyzing it. Amazon says DuckDB is a natural fit for AI agents, which query data much the way people do, poking and experimenting with small sets before deciding what they want.

“DuckDB ends up being naturally optimized for AI agents to use,” wrote Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the AWS VP who leads its cloud data services, in a post about the acquisition.

DuckLabs said it has worked closely with AWS in recent years, including on DuckDB support for Amazon’s S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse.

“DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today,” said Andy Warfield, an AWS vice president and distinguished engineer, in a press release announcing the deal.

‘That’s Amazon’s playbook’

One of the companies watching closely is in Seattle. MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, was founded in partnership with the DuckLabs team and has worked with it closely for four years. Three of its engineers are among the top 10 outside contributors to the DuckDB project.

In a blog post Wednesday, MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani said Amazon is following a familiar pattern. “That’s Amazon’s playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service,” wrote Tigani, who helped start Google’s BigQuery and spent a decade there before co-founding MotherDuck in 2022.

He expects Amazon to do exactly that with DuckDB: “After all, they’re not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source,” he wrote. “We welcome the competition.”

He said the deal is likely to be good for DuckDB, because Amazon has a financial reason to keep the project open and healthy. “If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money,” he wrote.

Tigani said DuckLabs is being kept as a wholly owned subsidiary with its organization intact, and that the DuckDB Foundation has “iron clad control over the DuckDB IP.”

MotherDuck also said it is now offering enterprise support for DuckDB — which it had previously steered clear of to avoid competing with DuckLabs. Tigani said the company has Mühleisen and Raasveldt’s “explicit blessing” to take it on now that they are joining Amazon.

Five years, no venture capital

DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago as a long-term home for the DuckDB development team. The company turned down venture capital, stayed owned by its founders and employees, and grew to more than 30 people in Amsterdam, funding itself through support and feature-development contracts.

In a blog post, Mühleisen and Raasveldt wrote that they had come to worry DuckDB’s growth would outpace their ability to support it, and that their small company “could become a bottleneck for the project.” Building a larger sales and operations organization, they wrote, would have pulled the team away from the technical work that made DuckDB successful.

Nine days before the acquisition was announced, Mühleisen and Raasveldt published a preview of DuckDB 2.0, due this fall, declaring that the release “kicks off the year of DuckDB as a server.” It adds Quack, which lets one DuckDB instance serve data to others over a network, along with work aimed at speeding up queries against data held in object storage such as S3.

DuckLabs said the DuckDB Foundation will add a technical advisory board, giving leading community members input on the project’s technical direction. The company also plans to let DuckDB run extensions signed by outside developers and organizations.