# Apache Iceberg vs DuckDB

| Attribute | Apache Iceberg | DuckDB |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 59.5 (56% (medium)) | 59.1 (51% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 1 | 1 |
| adoption.github_stars | 9,326 | 42,154 |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 6,665,583 | 15,285,415 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"Apache Iceberg is a table format that enables reliable, ACID-compliant SQL operations on big data. It allows multiple query engines—such as Spark, Trino, Flink, Hive, and Impala—to safely read and write the same tables concurrently, bringing traditional database semantics to analytics workloads. It is indexed under Data Warehouse Software.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"What is Apache Iceberg?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Apache Iceberg is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"Is Apache Iceberg free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache Iceberg can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"Can Apache Iceberg be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 20 integrations for Apache Iceberg, including Spark, Trino, Presto, Flink, Hive, Impala, PyArrow and DuckDB, plus 12 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://iceberg.apache.org","question":"What does Apache Iceberg integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Apache Iceberg is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg","question":"Is Apache Iceberg open source?","confidence":0.95}]` | `[{"answer":"An in-process SQL analytical database that runs natively in applications across operating systems and environments. Supports querying files and cloud data directly with a SQL dialect and includes vector search capabilities. It is indexed under Data Warehouse Software.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"What is DuckDB?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"DuckDB is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the MIT licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"Is DuckDB free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"DuckDB supports the web, Windows, macOS, Linux and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"What platforms does DuckDB support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. DuckDB can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"Can DuckDB be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 27 integrations for DuckDB, including Postgres, AWS, S3, Azure, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, SQLite and MySQL, plus 19 more. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"What does DuckDB integrate with?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. DuckDB is published under the MIT licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb","question":"Is DuckDB open source?","confidence":0.99},{"answer":"DuckDB is available worldwide. The vendor is headquartered in the Netherlands.","source":"https://duckdb.org","question":"Where is DuckDB available?","confidence":0.75}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"self_hosted":true}` | `{"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | A table format that brings SQL capabilities to large-scale analytical datasets and enables multiple computing engines to safely and concurrently query and modify the same tables. | A portable analytical database that runs locally or embedded in applications, with PostgreSQL-like SQL and APIs for major programming languages, supporting popular data formats including CSV, JSON, Parquet, and Apache Iceberg. |
| features.capabilities | `{"deployment":"embedded","data_sharing":true,"license_class":"permissive","table_formats":"Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files)","semi_structured":"first_class","federation_query":true,"streaming_ingest":true,"concurrency_scaling":"automatic"}` | `{"in_db_ml":true,"deployment":"embedded","sql_dialect":"vendor","license_class":"permissive","table_formats":"Parquet, CSV, JSON, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Vortex, DuckLake, Lance, Arrow, Avro, E","semi_structured":"functional","federation_query":true}` |
| integrations.count | 20 | 27 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Spark"},{"name":"Trino"},{"name":"Presto"},{"name":"Flink"},{"name":"Hive"},{"name":"Impala"},{"name":"PyArrow"},{"name":"DuckDB"},{"name":"Polars"},{"name":"Pandas"},{"name":"Ray"},{"name":"Datafusion"},{"name":"BigQuery"},{"name":"SQLAlchemy"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"GCS"},{"name":"Azure Data Lake Storage"},{"name":"Hadoop"},{"name":"Kerberos"},{"name":"Thrift"},{"name":"Avro"},{"name":"Parquet"},{"name":"ORC"}]` | `[{"name":"Postgres"},{"name":"AWS"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"Azure"},{"name":"Google Cloud"},{"name":"Hugging Face"},{"name":"SQLite"},{"name":"MySQL"},{"name":"Iceberg"},{"name":"Delta Lake"},{"name":"Parquet"},{"name":"JSON"},{"name":"Arrow"},{"name":"Avro"},{"name":"Pandas"},{"name":"dplyr"},{"name":"Jupyter"},{"name":"Marimo"},{"name":"Claude"},{"name":"Cloudflare"},{"name":"ODBC"},{"name":"HTTP"},{"name":"Excel"},{"name":"Vortex"},{"name":"DuckLake"},{"name":"Lance"},{"name":"Geospatial formats"},{"name":"PostgreSQL","category":"database"},{"name":"Apache Iceberg","category":"table_format"},{"name":"ADBC","native":true}]` |
| language.primary | Java | C++ |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| market.availability | - | `{"hqCountry":"NL","primaryMarkets":[],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"linux":true,"windows":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open source, no licensing cost","sourceUrl":"https://iceberg.apache.org","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T08:32:59.428Z"}` | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Free, open source under MIT license","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://duckdb.org","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T15:30:03.636Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | - | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | free | free |
| pricing.transparent | - | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 50 | 33 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.12.0","date":"2026-09-30T01:52:18Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.12.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.11.0","date":"2026-05-20T08:47:57Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.11.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.2","date":"2026-05-18T21:58:12Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.1","date":"2025-12-22T22:04:42Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.0","date":"2025-09-11T15:08:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.2","date":"2025-07-18T13:44:58Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.1","date":"2025-05-28T16:52:05Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.0","date":"2025-04-28T06:27:16Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.2","date":"2025-03-19T10:12:37Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.1","date":"2025-02-28T07:52:17Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.0","date":"2025-02-13T09:13:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.1","date":"2024-12-06T20:01:03Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.0","date":"2024-11-08T15:12:01Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.1","date":"2024-08-27T17:47:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.0","date":"2024-07-23T12:06:44Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.2","date":"2024-05-16T07:50:32Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.1","date":"2024-04-30T12:43:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.0","date":"2024-03-11T11:00:15Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.3","date":"2023-12-27T17:15:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.2","date":"2023-11-07T16:44:26Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.2"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.6","date":"2026-09-28T13:35:11Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.5","date":"2026-07-22T10:51:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.4","date":"2026-06-17T10:45:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.5","date":"2026-06-17T10:42:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.3","date":"2026-05-20T11:50:43Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.2","date":"2026-04-13T10:46:51Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.1","date":"2026-03-23T12:10:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.5.0","date":"2026-03-09T12:40:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.4","date":"2026-01-26T12:08:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.3","date":"2025-12-09T10:20:40Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.2","date":"2025-11-12T13:04:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.1","date":"2025-10-07T10:29:57Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.4.0","date":"2025-09-16T10:17:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.3.2","date":"2025-07-08T10:39:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.3.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.3.1","date":"2025-06-16T13:54:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.3.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.3.0","date":"2025-05-21T16:04:19Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.2.2","date":"2025-04-08T08:44:15Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.2.1","date":"2025-03-05T18:03:02Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.2.0","date":"2025-02-05T13:57:07Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/tag/v1.1.3","date":"2024-11-04T13:59:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.1.3"}]` |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | - |
| security.scorecard | 7.9 | - |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=apache-iceberg&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=conda&package_name=python-duckdb&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Data Warehouse Software)

| Capability | Apache Iceberg | DuckDB |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Embedded | Embedded |
| **Architecture** |  |  |
| Architecture | - | - |
| Compute model | - | - |
| **Query** |  |  |
| SQL dialect | - | Vendor-specific |
| Federation / lakehouse query-in-place | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Interoperability** |  |  |
| Table-format support | Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files) | Parquet, CSV, JSON, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Vortex, DuckLake, Lance, Arrow, Avro, E |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Concurrency scaling | Automatic | - |
| **Ingestion** |  |  |
| Streaming ingest | ✓ | - |
| **Data model** |  |  |
| Semi-structured (JSON/VARIANT) | First-class | Functional |
| **Analytics** |  |  |
| ML / in-DB functions | - | ✓ |
| **Sharing** |  |  |
| Data sharing / marketplace | ✓ | - |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Permissive OSS |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T20:10:37.719Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*