Announcing the Hydra Partnership

DuckDB Labs is excited to announce that we are going to be working with Hydra in the coming years to build DuckDB-Powered PostgreSQL for real-time apps and analytics development. DuckDB Labs has entered a long-term strategic partnership with Hydra to enrich and extend the DuckDB ecosystem. Joseph Sciarrino and his co-founder, Jonathan Dance “JD” helped pioneer the fusion of columnar analytics with transactional RDBMS, raising the bar of what’s possible with Postgres, which is why we are confident to join them in this endeavor.

Our collaboration with Hydra revolves around pg_duckdb, an open-source (MIT licensed) program that embeds DuckDB’s state-of-the-art analytics engine and features within Postgres. pg_duckdb is meant for developing high-performance applications and analytics with any new or existing Postgres database. We’ve observed software engineers increasingly embedding powerful analytics directly into their applications. These applications tend to require both greater access to disparate data sources and sub-second response times. We believe pg_duckdb will serve these use-cases nicely by overcoming Postgres’ known limitations in analytical processing.

The Hydra team has graciously donated the pg_duckdb repository to the DuckDB Foundation to ensure the project remains open-source and free of conflict. We applaud and share Joseph & JD’s belief in the necessity and long-term benefits of creating an open-source data foundation as the bedrock of future work. pg_duckdb’s continued development is driven in collaboration with Hydra and MotherDuck as both companies share an exciting vision for the role of DuckDB in application development.

Hydra joins DuckDB Labs’ excellent lineup of partners that includes MotherDuck, Voltron Data, and others. DuckDB Labs is not funded by venture capital, its sole owners are the people in the founding team. All our revenue comes from partnerships where our partners employ DuckDB in mission-critical roles and contract with DuckDB Labs for close and long-term development collaboration. This allows DuckDB Labs to focus on pushing boundaries in the DuckDB software project without chasing exponential growth in sales.

While consulting alone is a viable business model for open-source companies, it does not scale well. To address this, DuckDB Labs has acquired shares in Hydra, which connects their success with ours. This way, DuckDB Labs’ founding team joins in the financial success of our partners while allowing us to focus on the technical challenges as an artisanal database company.

We welcome all contributions and support to pg_duckdb, large and small as pg_duckdb works towards its first release.

← back to main page