MotherDuck | The Cloud Data Warehouse Built on DuckDB

# MotherDuck MotherDuck is a modern serverless data warehouse built on DuckDB. It's faster and significantly less expensive than Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift, designed for humans, agents and applications, and AI native. Every user and every agent gets their own isolated DuckDB instance (a "Duckling") that spins up in 100ms and shuts down when idle. MotherDuck is also a company - the Answers Company. The point of every data warehouse, dashboard, and pipeline is to answer questions about your data. MotherDuck collapses the distance between question and answer: talk to your data through any AI interface, get sub-second query performance, and let everyone — technical or not — explore data without waiting on the data team. ## How It Works MotherDuck runs DuckDB in the cloud with a hypertenancy architecture. Instead of cramming all workloads onto a shared cluster, every user, every customer, and every agent gets one or more dedicated DuckDB instances. This eliminates noisy neighbors, removes workload management complexity, and lets SaaS companies give each of their end users isolated, fast analytics. Processing each query on a single isolated machine means no data shuffling between nodes, no distributed querying overhead, and faster iteration. DuckDB improves rapidly — version 1.4 was 20% faster than its predecessor — and MotherDuck inherits every improvement. The largest instance (Giga) matches a Snowflake 3XL in hardware, and very few workloads need more than that. For high concurrency, read scaling lets dozens or hundreds of users each get their own instance, rather than competing for shared resources. Storage and compute are separated. You can query petabytes of data in S3, GCS, or Azure (including Iceberg and Delta Lake tables) without ingestion. DuckLake handles large-data, small-compute scenarios like logs and observability where you write a lot but only look at recent slices. ## AI and Agents MotherDuck is built for agentic analytics. The MCP (M