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Notes from
the farm.

DuckDB, Apache Arrow, SQL, and data engineering.

Written by the people building it.

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DuckDB VARIANT and Arrow: What Works Today

DuckDB 2.0 brings VARIANT to SQL, storage, and Parquet. Direct Arrow interchange is close, but support still differs across C++, Python, Go, Rust, and Java.

The Foundation owns the IP. DuckLabs ships the release.

The IP is safe under the DuckDB Foundation, but the Foundation doesn't cut releases — DuckLabs does. What the AWS acquisition changes for people who build on DuckDB, and what Query Farm is doing about it.

Compiling Isn't Running: Functionally Testing DuckDB-WASM Extensions

A DuckDB extension that compiles for WebAssembly has only proven that it compiles. Whether it loads, and whether it actually runs, are separate questions. I built a Node harness to ask them across 124 community extensions. Here's what it found and the fixes that came out of it.

Quack and VGI: Two Approaches to Bringing RPC to DuckDB

Quack — the new client/server protocol extension for DuckDB — was announced today. It's been built since November 2025, almost exactly as long as I've been building VGI. Here's what's interesting, what's surprising, and where the two projects converge and diverge.

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