(Last updated: March 2026)

The DuckDB project is governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation. The Foundation and DuckDB Labs are not funded by external investors (e.g., venture capital). Instead, the Foundation is funded by contributions from its members, while DuckDB Labs' revenue is based on commercial support and feature prioritization services.

This list was compiled by the DuckDB maintainers and is based on the long-term strategic vision for the DuckDB project and general interactions with users in the open-source community (GitHub Issues and Discussions, social media, etc.). For details on how to request features in DuckDB, please refer to the FAQ item “I would like feature X to be implemented in DuckDB”.

Planned Features

This section lists the features that the DuckDB team plans to work on in the coming year.

• Migration and documentation to C client API and C extension API
• Rust support for extensions
• Improvements to lakehouse formats
  • Continuous improvement for the Iceberg format through the iceberg extension. Several Iceberg improvements, including write support, were released in DuckDB v1.4 releases and in DuckDB v1.5.
  • Improved support for Delta Lake through the delta extension.
  • In May 2025, we released DuckLake, a new lakehouse format. We would like to emphasize that we are still committed to developing both the iceberg and delta extensions. We also strive to provide interoperability between DuckLake and other lakehouse formats.
• MATCH_RECOGNIZE for pattern matching
• Support for async I/O
• Parallel Python UDFs

Please note that there are no guarantees that a particular feature will be released within the next year. Everything on this page is subject to change without notice.

Planned Deprecations

We are gradually phasing out the lambda syntax (x -> x + 1) in favor of the Pythonic lambda x : x + 1. DuckDB v1.5 throws a warning when using the deprecated syntax and DuckDB v2.0 will throw an error (unless configured explicitly to allow the old syntax).

Future Work / Looking for Funding

There are several items that we plan to implement at some point in the future. If you would like to expedite the development of these features, please get in touch with DuckDB Labs.

• Go support for extensions
• Time series optimizations
• Partition-aware optimizations
• Sorting-aware optimizations
• Better filter cardinality estimation using automatically maintained table samples
• ALTER TABLE support for adding foreign keys
• Improvements of query profiling (especially for concurrently running queries)
• Materialized views
• Support for PL/SQL stored procedures (see Denis Hirn's talk at the DuckDB Developer Meeting #1)
• XML read support
• Guaranteeing FIPS-compliance for the database encryption