Announcing DuckDB 1.0.0
published on 2024/06/04
For us, one of the major blockers to releasing 1.0.0 was the storage format. DuckDB has its own custom-built data storage format. This format allows users to manage many (possibly very large) tables in a single file with full transactional semantics and state-of-the-art compression. Of course, designing a new file format is not without its challenges, and we had to make significant changes to the format over time. This led to the suboptimal situation that whenever a new DuckDB version was released, the files created with the old version did not work with the new DuckDB version and had to be manually upgraded. This problem was addressed in v0.10.0 back in February – where we introduced backward compatibility and limited forward compatibility for DuckDB’s storage format. This feature has now been used in the wild for a while without serious issues – providing us with the confidence to offer a guarantee that DuckDB files created with DuckDB 1.0.0 will be compatible with future DuckDB versions.