# DuckLake

36 Hacker News commenters recommended DuckLake and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a lakehouse layer with a SQL database catalog for ACID metadata transactions and speed. Critics say some features are still alpha and not fully production-ready.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster than alternatives (4 comments): "Queries were much, much faster than all alternatives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867800)) "ducklake performs better than others" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923985)) "The numbers seem to crush iceberg." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755836))
- ACID transactions for catalog metadata (4 comments): "The difference is that DuckLake will use that database with all its ACID goodness for all metadata operations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925641)) "Ducklake supports postgres for the catalog, so you get the postgres concurrency benefits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338877)) "cross table transactions are not possible in iceberg/delta, but they are in ducklake" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47797680))
- Lightweight stack; easy integration tests (2 comments): "the whole stack is pretty lightweight and there’s support for inlining inserts in the catalog" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293377)) "integration tests become really easy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50290248))
- Postgres as catalog works well (3 comments): "We're using ducklake with data storage on Google cloud storage and the catalog inside a postgres database and it's a breeze!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649490)) "extending a postgres db to read the same data store via pglake (or duckdb + ducklake) is actually pretty slick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193831)) "Ducklake supports postgres for the catalog, so you get the postgres concurrency benefits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338877))

## What people warn about

- Still alpha or not production-ready (4 comments): "DuckLake's feature of flushing inlined data to parquet is still in alpha" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925881)) "But I'm not at the point where I'd flat out advise it to other people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50254985)) "it is not quite in a stable production state" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649018))
- Needs a dedicated SQL metadata database (4 comments): "they store the snapshot metadata in a relation database. I have a use case where we do 100k changes a second." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788804)) "that required us to move away from PG-first approach" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48351556)) "it requires SQL database to represent its catalog" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45922956))
- Needs a fork or extra dependency (2 comments): "I love it, but you need a fork for now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012847)) "Much faster, but adds a dependency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013413))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Apache Iceberg](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-iceberg.md): 26 recommend
- [Delta Lake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/delta-lake.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DuckLake", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ducklake/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).