Quack-Cluster: A Serverless Distributed SQL Query Engine with DuckDB and Ray | Hacker News Reader

Quack-Cluster: A Serverless Distributed SQL Query Engine with DuckDB and Ray

github.com

80 pointstanelpoder15 comments

So DuckDB was developed to allow queries for bigish data finally without the need for a cluster to simplify data analysis... and we now put it to a cluster?

I think there are solutions for that scale of data already, and simplicity is the best feature of DuckDB (at lest for me).

Big fan of this push back, because there are alot of projects that have that smell over engineering with the wrong base. (especially with vibecoding now) Thought there are use cases where some have lots of medium-sized data divided up. For compliance, I have a lot of reporting data split such that duckdb instances running in separate processes work amazing for us especially with lower complexity to other compute engines in that environment. If I wanted to move everything into somewhere a clickhouse/trino/databrick/etc would work well the compliance complexity skyrockets and makes it so we have to have perfect configs and tons of extra time invested to get the same devex

> "So DuckDB was developed to allow queries for bigish data finally without the need for a cluster to simplify data analysis... and we now put it to a cluster?"

This is a fair point, but I think there's a middle ground. DuckDB handles surprisingly large datasets on a single machine, but "surprisingly large" still has limits. If you're querying 10TB of parquet files across S3, even DuckDB needs help.

The question is whether Ray is the right distributed layer for this. Curious what the alternative would be—Spark feels like overkill, but rolling your own coordination is painful.

> "Forget about managing complex server infrastructure for your database needs."

So what does this run on then?

No docs, it's not possible to find any deployment guides for Ray using serverless solutions like Lambda, Cloud Functions or be it your own Firecracker.

Instead, every other post mentions EKS or EC2.

The Ray team even rejected Lambda support expressedly as far back as 2020 [0]. Uuuuuugh.

No thanks! shiver

I'd rather cut complexity for practically the same benefit and either do it single machine or have a thin, manageable layer on top a truly serverless infra like in this talk [1] " Processing Trillions of Records at Okta with Mini Serverless Databases".

0: https://github.com/ray-project/ray/issues/9983

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrmJilG4GXk

What is the lifetime of the Ray workers, or, in other words, what is the scalability / scale-to-zero story that makes this serverless?

feels like a missed opportunity to call it cluster-quack xD

Surely “clusterduck” would be better…

Agreed, but maybe that's what you call it when you get your configs wrong

neat. i'm pretty novice in the guts of this kind of stuff, but how does this work under the hood for blocking operators where they "cannot output a single row until the last row of their input has been seen"?

i think this is where spark shuffling comes in? but how does it work here.

https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/guides/performance/how_to_tun...

In my experience ray clusters don't scale well and end up costing you more money. You need to run permanent per-user instances etc.

What you need is a multi-tenancy shared infrastructure that is elastic.

Why is everyone so scared of pyspark? Make it run in a local docker image and call it off to a sagemaker processing job

Serverless? So it runs on... nothing?

No it just runs on other people's servers.

Reminds me of smallpond from deepseek

Which, unfortunately, is not maintained: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/smallpond

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