Developer Advocate
Alex joins us from Intel where he worked as a data scientist building a DuckDB-powered analytics platform.
2026/09/02 - Alex Monahan
We analyzed a slice of MotherDuck query history and found agents ran 29 times more queries than humans last month, a gap that has roughly doubled every month. The average organization now has twice as many agents as human users. Agents are the dominant consumers of the data platform, and our systems can't afford to stay the same.
2026/08/28 - Alex Monahan
If your laptop has 16GB of RAM, your agent can write SQL locally for free with Qwen3.8 27B. On the DABstep SQL benchmark, Qwen beat GPT 5.6 Luna and cost under 50 cents in electricity, over 17x less. Add DuckDB and you have a data analyst that runs on your own machine. This post covers the benchmark results and walks through the setup, including which quantized model to download for your laptop.
2026/08/20 - Jacob Matson, Alex Monahan
We proved that AI agents could build a semantic layer. The more interesting result was that the semantic layer itself became disposable. Q&A pairs are unreasonably effective at capturing business intent and give agents something concrete to iterate with. If code can be regenerated, where should your company accrue knowledge?
2026/08/18 - Alex Monahan
AI agents make building data apps easy, but what about deploying them or making sure they scale? Replit provides a way for just about anyone to build real applications, and MotherDuck is the easiest way to help them scale to larger data sizes. Load data with MotherDuck Flights and you can query millions to billions of rows on the fly!
2026/08/13 - Alex Monahan
Use an agent to build data apps with the combo of Vercel V0 and MotherDuck! V0 makes prototyping and deployment easy, while MotherDuck Flights provide seamless data ingestion and MotherDuck handles up to billions of rows. Your agent can even sign up for MotherDuck for you! See a full example app and the prompt that kickstarted it!
2026/08/01 - Alex Monahan, Jacob Matson
Since OpenAI slashed the price of GPT 5.6 Luna by 80% this week, low latency AI-powered answers are finally feasible for less than half a penny per answer, AI and DB costs included. For data questions, GPT 5.6 Luna is intelligence too cheap to meter. Well documented context, rigorous evals, and a fast analytical engine are now the determining factors.
2026/07/16 - Alex Monahan
Waiting in line is no fun! While standing in line at Disney World, a developer dad built a custom data app to pick the perfect next ride. It combines live APIs, historical wait times, and weather data into personal software with MotherDuck's MCP, Dives, and Flights.
2026/07/10 - Alex Monahan
DuckLake is a next generation data lakehouse and open table format. It is significantly simpler and faster than Apache Iceberg or Delta Lake because it uses a SQL database for storing the catalog and metadata. This post covers an architecture deep dive with a detailed Q&A section. DuckLake consists of 3 components: storage, catalog, and compute. Each can be scaled independently, hosted locally with ease, and deployed to the cloud for production. MotherDuck offers managed DuckLake lakehouses for additional simplicity and performance.
1:00:17
2026-07-09
See inside DuckLake's architecture: a SQL database catalog, Parquet storage, and pluggable compute that cut metadata latency to milliseconds.
Webinar
SQL
MotherDuck Features
2026/06/18 - Alex Monahan
Build full data pipelines by prompting your AI agent, no Python required. MotherDuck Flights are perfect for data ingestion, transformation, and activation. Flight Plan templates show you and your agent how to ingest from Postgres, sync Google Sheets, and send Slack alerts.
1:02:00
2026-05-07
Watch how an AE and a marketer use AI to analyze their own business data without writing SQL or waiting on a data team.
Webinar
AI, ML and LLMs
MotherDuck Features
Tutorial
1:01:04
2026-04-28
Learn how DuckLake's SQL-backed catalog cuts metadata latency to milliseconds, then tune Parquet settings, inlining, and partitioning for production.
Webinar
SQL
MotherDuck Features
2026/04/16 - Alex Monahan
MotherDuck now supports DuckLake 1.0, the open table lakehouse format designed for simplicity and low latency. Learn what's new in the 1.0 release, including data inlining, clustering, bucket partitioning, geometry and variant types, plus multi-engine support. Learn how DuckLake compares with Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake.
60:41
2026-04-09
BI tools were never built to be app interfaces — they're rigid, clunky, and add complexity to your user experience. Dives offer a different approach: interactive data apps you create with natural language that can be embedded directly into your applications. In this session, Alex Monahan walks through how to build a Dive and embed it in your app, with help from AI agents. You'll learn how to create interactive visualizations with natural language queries, embed Dives into your app with a secure sandbox, set up the auth flow so your users get read-only access without exposing credentials, and choose between server-side and dual execution with DuckDB-Wasm. Whether you're building customer-facing analytics or internal tools, this webinar shows you the full workflow from query to production-ready embed. See how Claude Code + Dives can get you from zero to a working data app fast.
Webinar
MotherDuck Features
BI & Visualization
App Development
58:00
2026-04-07
Alex Monahan and Jacob Matson walk through DuckDB 1.5's biggest features including the VARIANT type, redesigned CLI, built-in GEOMETRY, and faster joins.
Webinar
55:29
2026-04-02
Matt Martin and Alex Monahan, coauthors of O'Reilly's DuckLake: The Definitive Guide, discuss what DuckLake is, how it simplifies lakehouse architecture, and why it replaces file-based metadata with a SQL database. Includes a live Q&A and the release of Chapter 1.
Webinar
Ecosystem
43:41
2026-03-26
Learn to build interactive data apps with MotherDuck Dives. Go beyond static charts with live SQL, React components, and shareable URLs.
Webinar
MotherDuck Features
BI & Visualization
2026/03/24 - Alex Monahan
Learn how MotherDuck's Hosted DuckLake combines lakehouse scale (borrowing the best ideas from Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake) with low latency and agent sandbox isolation, making it the simplest data lakehouse for AI-powered agentic workflows.
2026/03/09 - Alex Monahan
DuckDB 1.5 is both faster and easier to use! JSON analysis can be up to 100x faster thanks to the VARIANT type and JSON shredding. Real-world queries are faster, including both basic and complex queries. Writes to Azure are supported, and checkpoint concurrency is dramatically improved.
2026/03/02 - Alex Monahan
Learn how to build custom interactive data visualizations using MotherDuck Dives and Claude Code. From setup to sharing, create refreshable React and SQL-powered visuals with natural language prompts.
2026-01-21
Jacob and Alex from MotherDuck query data using the MotherDuck MCP. Watch as they analyze 180,000 rows of shipment data through conversational AI, uncovering late delivery patterns, profitability insights, and operational trends with no SQL required!
Stream
AI, ML and LLMs
MotherDuck Features
SQL
BI & Visualization
Tutorial
2025-10-14
MotherDuck’s managed DuckLake data lakehouse blends the cost efficiency, scale, and openness of a lakehouse with the speed of a warehouse for truly joyful dbt pipelines. They will show you how!
Talk
2025/10/09 - Alex Monahan, Garrett O'Brien
MotherDuck now supports DuckDB 1.4.1 and DuckLake 0.3, with new SQL syntax, faster sorting, Iceberg interoperability, and more. Read on for the highlights from these major releases.
2025/08/04 - Jacob Matson, Alex Monahan
Learn essential SQL to verify AI-generated queries. Master SELECT, JOIN, and CTEs to safely analyze data with LLMs. Includes DuckDB examples and safety tips
2025-06-02
Tame "file zoos" with DuckDB! This talk reveals how DuckDB seamlessly integrates with Python to read/write diverse files (CSV, Parquet), organize data efficiently, enable larger-than-memory analysis, and streamline your workflows.
Python
Talk
0:52:48
2024-04-22
Develop locally and ship to production confidently with Dagster data pipelines, Evidence dashboards powered by DuckDB and Markdown, and the MotherDuck cloud data warehouse.
YouTube
Data Pipelines
0:00:47
2024-01-22
This short of Mehdi with Alex Monahan discusses the lack of evolution of the SQL standard. “(SQL) stands for Structured Query Language, not Standard Query Language”
YouTube
Short
SQL
0:54:38
2024-01-05
Explore friendly and even friendlier SQL & DuckDB with Mehdi annd Alex Monahan! They discuss history, its future role in data and show some tips and tricks.
YouTube
SQL
Quack & Code
