A pluggable storage engine that brings DuckDB's columnar analytical engine inside MariaDB Server.
Create a table with ENGINE=DuckDB and analytical queries against it are executed through DuckDB's columnar vectorized engine — no ETL pipelines, no separate cluster, no additional protocols. One server, one SQL interface, the familiar mariadb client.
- HTAP (Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing) — InnoDB handles OLTP, DuckDB handles analytics, both in the same database.
- Ad-hoc analytical queries — complex joins, aggregations, subqueries, and window functions over large datasets without exporting data to a separate system.
- Eliminating ETL complexity — no need for a dedicated analytical cluster or data movement pipelines; the analytical engine runs in-process.
TPC-H Scale Factor 10 (~10 GB raw data, ~60M rows in lineitem):
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Data loading | 250 seconds |
| All 22 TPC-H queries | 3.7 seconds total |
DuckDB is an in-process analytical database. Its performance rests on three pillars:
- Columnar storage — minimizes unnecessary data reads.
- Vectorized execution — processes data in batches for maximum CPU cache efficiency.
- Parallelism — leverages all available processor cores.
Tables created with ENGINE=DuckDB store data in DuckDB's native format. Queries are translated and executed by the DuckDB engine. InnoDB and DuckDB tables coexist in the same database.
The engine is built as part of the MariaDB server tree. It lives under storage/duckdb/ and uses ExternalProject_Add to build DuckDB from source (submodule at third_parties/duckdb/).
# Clone MariaDB Server
git clone https://github.com/MariaDB/server.git mariadb-server
cd mariadb-server
# Clone the DuckDB engine into the storage directory (with submodules)
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/drrtuy/duckdb-engine.git storage/duckdb
# Build
./storage/duckdb/build.shThis project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2. See COPYING for details.
DuckDB itself is licensed under the MIT License.
Alibaba and the AliSQL Project — A special thank you to Alibaba and their engineering team for open-sourcing AliSQL. AliSQL is a MySQL branch developed at Alibaba Group and extensively used in their production infrastructure. The December 2025 open-source release of AliSQL 8.0 included integration of DuckDB as a native storage engine, providing a valuable reference implementation and validating the viability of embedding DuckDB inside a MySQL-compatible server. The DuckDB Engine for MariaDB draws heavily on this experience.
The DuckDB Project — None of this would be possible without the remarkable work of the DuckDB team. DuckDB has grown from an academic research project into one of the most impressive analytical engines available today — fast, embeddable, dependency-free, and released under the permissive MIT License. Its clean C++ codebase and well-defined embedding API are what make integrations like this one feasible.