But why though? DuckDB can still be used as a local query engine — I still use it as that. I haven’t touched any of the DuckLake stuff and the duckdb cli and Python library are still my bread and butter. They can add new use cases, but it doesn’t affect the core engine.

Is the concern that the duckdb messaging is now diluted by it having all these extra features? That you can’t sell it to friends as “this thing” like you can a one use tool like curl? I get that, but I also feel that duckdb is so much bigger than a “do one thing and do it well” tool.

It’s an engine that drives the modern data tool stack. Duckdb’s team has been prescient in that it has made many tasteful bets on what users want —- the ability to interop with pandas and polars, addition of geospatial, the plug-in infra. They’re all optional but when you neeed these things, they’re so useful. They’ve also clued me into what the broader data world is thinking about (I didn’t know about sketches and hilbert, but those are so useful in probailistic large scale queries and in geospatial queries). And they exist in larger database systems like Redshift too.

So far duckdb’s bets have been tasteful, and mostly ignorable if you don’t happen to use them.