Peter Boncz

ALP compression is now in Parquet🎉 github.com/apache/parqu... ALP was created by Azim, Leonardo & Peter 😀 so kudos to (ex) PhD students Azim Afroozeh & Leonardo Kuffo. code: github.com/cwida/ALP paper: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... It's also in @duckdb.org @clickhouse.com @spiraldb.com + more!

We just released a @duckdb.org community extension that automatically privatizes complex queries. Joint work with MIT (🙏 🙏) on their new PAC framework: news.mit.edu/2025/new-method-efficiently-safeguards-sensitive-ai-training-data-0411 We are 👀 for your feedback! paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.150...

DuckDB was added to the wall of fame of CWI, next to Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, the Atlantic Crossing of the Internet & the creation of Python On the occasion of our 80th (really!) bday Congrats to @hannes.muehleisen.org & @markraasveldt.bsky.social @duckdb.org @cwi-amsterdam.bsky.social

Azim had a stellar committee which included Daniel Lemire (TELUQ 🇨🇦), Pinar Tözün (ITU 🇩🇰) and Viktor Leis (TUM 🇩🇪). They gave talks at the Dutch Seminar on Data Systems Design (DSDSD) on SIMD-accelerated parsing, xNVMe and escaping from the insanity of SQL. (video will be posted on dsdsd.da.cwi.nl)

Today Azim Afroozeh defended his PhD thesis on FastLanes, which earned him a Cum Laude distinction ("top 5%"🇳🇱research). Promotors Hannes Mühleisen & me are very proud of his work! thesis: research.vu.nl/files/447013431/afroozehphdthesis%20-%2069280d90f0bfd.pdf FastLanes: github.com/cwida/FastLanes

@duckdb.org 1.4.0 is feature-packed: MERGE INTO, compressed in-mem DBs, Iceberg writes.. PhD students also contributed: - Laurens Kuiper: new k-way parallel mergesort duckdb.org/2025/09/24/sorting-again.html - Lotte Felius @ccfelius.bsky.social: on-disk DB encryption - Denis Hirn: materialized CTEs

Laurens Kuiper from @duckdb.org presented DuckDB's new memory assignment policy to run multi-join pipelines out-of-core with gracious performance degradation when join hash tables increasingly do not fit in RAM. A well-attended and -delivered talk! paper: vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p2748-kuiper.pdf

Tobias Schmidt (TUM) @vldb.bsky.social at VLDB2025 presented SQLStorm, which uses LLMs to generate a huge amount of complex queries SQLStorm now has 18K different complex queries and runs on a large real-world dataset (stackoverflow) paper: vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/... code: github.com/SQL-Storm/SQ...

Very honored to receive the @vldb.bsky.social 2025 Test of Time Award for the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) Kudos to my very talented TUM co-authors, specifically Viktor Leis who was the driving force & gave a great award talk. paper: www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p5531-viktor.pdf JOB: event.cwi.nl/da/job

Azim Afroozeh gave a great talk at @vldb.bsky.social VLDB2025 in London on the FastLanes file format. FastLanes compresses 1.4x better than Parquet/snappy and allows 40x faster reads on the PublicBI dataset! Paper: vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p4629-afroozeh.pdf Code: github.com/cwida/FastLanes

@sigmod2025.bsky.social Berlin is a wrap. Many 🙏 to the organizers! Next stop is @vldb.bsky.social London to present - github.com/cwida/FastLanes v0.1 of a new big data format - spilling multi-operator joins (via @duckdb.org) - the SQLStorm benchmark of 30k LLM-generated complex queries (via TUM)

Some pics of Leonardo Kuffo presenting his SIGMOD2025 paper on PDX. PDX is a vertical layout that can accelerate vector search in principle in any vector index technique (it makes the distance calculation faster, using better SIMD + pruning). ir.cwi.nl/pub/35044/3504… github.com/cwida/PDX

And.. Azim Afroozeh put a lot of effort in open-sourcing the ALP floating point compressor (github.com/cwida/ALP). Leonardo Kuffo had written with him the SIGMOD2024 paper which now won a reproducibility award! + 🙏🙏 to the reproducibility and artifacts committee - this is a ton of work.

But @cwi_da has no reason to complain, here in Berlin. Leonardo Kuffo at the preceding DaMoN2025 workshop won the Best Paper Award for a study that showed that for vector databases, it matters a lot which AWS CPU you pick. Congratulations to him!

SIGMOD2025 for the 1st time used a schedule where most papers are presented as posters only. Tips for next time: - gather user interest data prior to deciding poster-or-paper & room assignment. - present posters in a (high ceiling) room with good acoustics & allot enough presentation space + time.

🎞️ The stream of “DuckLake & The Future of Open Table Formats”, a conversation between Hannes Mühleisen and Jordan Tigani, will start in two hours!

The opening talk of #systemsdistributed, organized by our friends @tigerbeetle.com in the Eye Film museum in Amsterdam, was given by @hannes.muehleisen.org of @duckdb.org about: DuckLake (ducklake.select) and this was very well received movie poster refers back to CIDR2025 😄

DuckLake: leverage DB tech for Data Lake metadata. works on duckdb, postgres, MySQL & SQLite provides: - multi-statement & multi-table transactions - SQL views - delta queries - encryption - low latency: no S3 metadata & inlining: store small inserts in-catalog and more!

A new preprint from database researchers found DuckDB the most environmentally efficient system: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18980

Introducing the DuckDB Local UI, the easiest way to explore local data files with DuckDB. Built in close partnership with @duckdb.org for the community. duckdb -ui Learn more: duckdb.org/2025/03/12/d...

We strive to ensure that the DuckDB project stays open-source in the long term. That's why we set up the non-profit DuckDB Foundation in 2021. The Foundation owns the intellectual property of the DuckDB project and enshrines the availability of DuckDB as open-source in its notarized statutes.

Vanessa Evers will be our new director! Excited we will be able to draw on her expertise in integrating AI&tech in social interactions. More than ever, it is important technology is advanced in ways it positively contributes to society. www.cwi.nl/en/news/vanessa-evers-appointed-new-director-of-cwi

CIDR2025 is a wrap! Lived the many interesting papers & discussions, Gong Show, @duckdb reception.. ACM president Yannis Ioannidis gave an inspiring talk on open science. Proceedings are in ACM DL & VLDB (see cidrdb.org). 🙏 all in+outside @cwi-amsterdam.bsky.social who helped organize!!

In five days the CIDR2025 conference (cidrdb.org) will start, and we are expecting around 170 attendees from all over the world. On an unrelated note, the exotic "goldeneye" duck was just spotted in The Netherlands! See: bit.ly/duck-goldeneye

My @ldbcouncil.org TUC talk is online! 🎥 Learn about #DuckPGQ and #SQL/#PGQ here: 👉 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzci... Catch me at @fosdem.bsky.social on Feb 1 in the Data Analytics room, where I’ll continue spreading the word about #DuckPGQ and #SQL/#PGQ. Hope to see you there! 🚀 #FOSDEM2025

Many congrats @hannes.muehleisen.org! A well-deserved award, recognizing the innovations in @duckdb.org - the most successful open-source DB system to come from @cwi-amsterdam.bsky.social Let me also honor his 1st PhD student, Mark Raasveldt (DuckDB Labs CTO), instrumental in shaping the project.

@andypavlo.bsky.social's yearly database in review is out, and fun to read. Mentions @duckdb.org in the context of new postgres integrations ("shotgun weddings"?). Andy will again be in Amsterdam for CIDR2025 (Jan 19-22) & there are 4 days to register for it: cidrdb.org/cidr2025/registration.html

Amsterdam is once again hosting my favorite event, the Conference on Innovative Data Systems (CIDR2025). Check its exciting program: www.cidrdb.org/cidr2025/pro... It will be held January 19-22 in the Amsterdam Mövenpick hotel. Plan your trip quickly, because registration closes on Thursday!

Exciting milestone: The DuckPGQ extension for #DuckDB has surpassed 10,000 downloads!🎉 A huge thanks to the community for supporting DuckPGQ for graph analytics. Stay tuned—the next update will bring property graph creation over attached databases! Explore DuckPGQ here: duckdb.org/community_ex...

Excited to speak at #DuckCon #6 in Amsterdam on Jan 31, 2025!🎉 I’ll share how #DuckDB unlocks graph analytics with SQL/PGQ from the SQL:2023 standard using the #DuckPGQ extension. 📍 Free to attend & livestreamed on YouTube! 📅 Details + register: duckdb.org/events/2025/... 🚀 Hope to see you there!

Happy to see @motherduck.com opening shop in my hometown Amsterdam: bit.ly/motherduck-a... In reality, they have already been renting offices for 1.5 years close to the Database Architectures research group at CWI, but with a Dutch legal entity, and soon an own office, things are solidifying.

The closing of DBDBD 2024 was the "Amsterdam Data Systems" session, with talks from @databricks.bsky.social, @motherduck.com and @clickhouse.com (due to illness, @weaviate.bsky.social could not make it). These companies all have a significant presence in Amsterdam. Videos: bit.ly/cwida-ams-da...

But there's more! Last Friday, the day after the Dijkstra Award, it was our honor to host the 20th Dutch-Belgian Database Day (DBDBD2024) at CWI. It was well-attended and lively. 🙏 to all who made it possible! DBDBD2024 pictures are on cwida.github.io/dbdbd2024 (scroll down):

Furthermore, we have now posted the videos of these lectures in the Dutch Seminar on Data Systems Design (DSDSD) YouTube channel: bit.ly/cwida-dijkst... many 🙏 to Daniel ten Wolde & Leonardo Kuffo Rivero for editing these!

Some pictures of the CWI lectures on database architecture, more here: cwida.github.io/dbdbd2024/di... 🙏 to Marcin Zukowski + @andypavlo.bsky.social @madelonhulsebos.bsky.social @hannes.muehleisen.org, Viktor Leis & Allison Lee for their contributions, but also to all who attended!

The Database Capital of Europe

At cwi.nl/en/events/dijkstra-awards/cwi-lectures-dijkstra-fellowship we awarded the Dijkstra Fellowship to Marcin Zukowski for his contributions to DB architecture in a full room & great speakers: Allison Lee, Viktor Leis, @andypavlo.bsky.social @hannes.muehleisen.org @madelonhulsebos.bsky.social