The future never shows up quietly. Just when you think you’ve tamed the latest “must-have” technology, a fresh acronym crashes the party. I’d barely finished wrapping my head around the Lakehouse paradigm when Databricks rolled out something new at the 2025 Data & AI Summit: Lakebase, a fully managed PostgreSQL engine built directly into the Databricks platform.
Cue the collective gasp—and the scramble—for data teams everywhere.
I’d be lying if I said a small part of me didn’t groan when I first read about SQL Scripting being released by Databricks.
Don’t get me wrong—I don’t fault Databricks for giving users what they want. After all, if you don’t feed the masses, they’ll turn on you. We data engineers are gluttons for punishment. We grumble, we fight with complexity, but somehow, we get the job done.
So why did this announcement sting a bit? Because I’ve been around long enough to remember the old days—the old days. When SQL Servers ruled the land, unleashing T-SQL, stored procedures, and SSIS packages everywhere. Some of you will remember those dark times, battling deadlocks and debugging cryptic errors in SSMS. Others were lucky enough to be born into the light.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, and I still don’t know whether to cheer or groan. Some moments, I see DuckLake as a smart, much-needed evolution; other times, it feels like just another unnecessary entry in the ever-growing Lake House jungle.
Reality, as always, is probably somewhere in between.
MotherDuck and DuckDB have thrown their hat into the ring with yet another Lake House storage format. DuckLake joins an already crowded field, and here we are trying to make sense of it.