DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani)

Jordan Tigani helped build BigQuery, then left to bet that most data isn't big. Three years on, agents are proving him right.

The MotherDuck CEO joins Tristan Handy to open Season 9 of The Analytics Engineering Podcast, our season on Analytics x Agents. They get into why local-first, single-node databases fit the agent era, how MotherDuck stays faster and cheaper than the incumbents, where data lakes and Iceberg fit in, and what an "agent swarm for data management" would actually do.

🎧 Listen on your favorite app:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4BKMMeVXk4jJnAQSqGSJvE
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-analytics-engineering-podcast/id1574755368
Read the full episode page: https://roundup.getdbt.com/

🔗 Mentioned in this episode:
MotherDuck: https://motherduck.com
Big Data is Dead: https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/
Future Casting the Modern Data Stack: https://motherduck.com/blog/future-casting-the-modern-data-stack/
Water-Town: The Agent Swarm Data Stack: https://motherduck.com/blog/water-town-agent-swarm-data-stack/
MotherDuck Dives: https://motherduck.com/product/dives/
MotherDuck MCP server: https://github.com/motherduckdb/mcp-server-motherduck

👤 Guest: Jordan Tigani, co-founder and CEO of MotherDuck
🎙️ Host: Tristan Handy, co-founder of dbt Labs

Chapters:
0:00 Why DuckDB is having an agent moment
1:08 Reintroducing Jordan and MotherDuck
3:10 The MotherDuck and DuckDB Labs relationship
6:50 Where the line gets drawn: DuckDB vs. MotherDuck
9:44 Quack and the enterprise layer
11:05 How widely is DuckDB actually used?
13:25 Who uses MotherDuck, and what they migrate from
14:41 Hyper-tenancy and read scaling
18:05 Why it's faster and cheaper: latency vs. throughput
21:35 "Big Data is Dead," revisited
25:45 Iceberg, Duck Lake, and DuckDB on the lake
31:19 "ETL is highly vibe codable"
32:36 Tristan pushes back
35:00 From MCP server to Dives
38:35 What do agents want from an analytical database?
41:37 Two kinds of agents
43:09 The local-first advantage
46:02 The agent swarm and "Water-Town"
52:06 A thousand data analysts and the cost of inference
54:53 Wrap-up

The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.

#analyticsengineering #dbt #dataengineering #duckdb #aiagents

Видео DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani) канала dbt Labs