About this episode

Hannes Mühleisen discusses his journey into databases and the development of DuckDB.

In this episode, we sit down with Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO of Duck Labs and co-creator of DuckDB, for a wide-ranging conversation about how a self-described outsider ended up reshaping the analytics database world. Hannes shares how he accidentally fell into databases after moving to Amsterdam, why that outsider perspective helped him spot the “warts” everyone else had accepted, and his theory that traditional databases were “sold on the golf course” rather than built for the people who actually use them. We dig into the origins of DuckDB: the decision to throw away a working prototype and rebuild from scratch, the untapped gap between Excel/pandas and Spark, and why in-process analytics unlocked a whole new class of users. Hannes also explains the “venture communism” reasoning behind open-sourcing a project built with Dutch tax dollars, how a single Hacker News post lit the fuse, and the philosophy of solving one real user problem at a time. Finally, we get into the latest work — DuckLake, the Quack client-server protocol, the “never give up, never surrender” approach to queries that refuse to crash, and what changes when the entity querying your database shifts from…

People in this episode

Hosts: Kostas, Nitay

Guest: Hannes Mühleisen

Topics covered

• databases
• analytics
• open source
• user experience
• technology innovation

Keywords

• DuckDB
• Hannes Mühleisen
• analytics databases
• open source
• user experience
• database development
• Excel
• pandas
• Spark

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Duck Labs, Hacker News

Products: DuckDB

Places: Amsterdam

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