Quack
Judgement: Assess
DuckDB's new client-server protocol; promising but early — watch adoption beyond the DuckDB ecosystem.
Client-server wire protocol from DuckDB Labs for talking to a DuckDB server. Where JDBC/ODBC/ADBC are client APIs that bind to drivers, Quack defines the protocol on the wire — so clients in any language can speak to a DuckDB server without an embedded engine.
Positions DuckDB beyond the embedded use case it grew up in, and complements ADBC: ADBC standardises the columnar result contract, Quack standardises the connection.
Why it counts as a standard
Quack is published as an open protocol specification by DuckDB Labs. Listed on the de-facto criterion: the wire format is the standard surface, even though governance sits with a single vendor and adoption is still concentrated in the DuckDB ecosystem.
At a glance
- Category
- Database Connectivity
- Governance
- DuckDB Labs (vendor-driven open source)
- Status
- Emerging; new client-server protocol from the DuckDB ecosystem
- First released
- 2025
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Database Connectivity.
- ADBC — Arrow Database Connectivity
- JDBC — Java Database Connectivity
- ODBC — Open Database Connectivity
- XMLA — XML for Analysis
See Quack in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Quack against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.