April 13, 2026
Quack to School or Quack‑up
Design and Implementation of DuckDB Internals
Slides drop for DuckDB course—but where are the videos
TLDR: A 15‑week DuckDB internals course dropped slides on GitHub, but no videos. Commenters split between excitement over deep, free material and frustration about missing lectures, with fans calling DuckDB a “Swiss army knife” and skeptics asking if the repo’s even ready—important for students and data folks hunting real-world database know-how.
A new university course peeks under the hood of DuckDB—the speedy, in-your-laptop database—and the internet immediately split into two camps. On one side, the “show me the goods” crowd: early commenters pounced with “is the content empty?” and sighed that it “does not seem that there are lecture videos.” If there’s one thing the web hates, it’s homework without a playlist.
On the other side, the diehards showed up quacking. One fan called DuckDB “a swiss army knife,” linking to a classic 2020 talk and urging everyone to add it to their data-cleaning toolkit. Another shouted out type-safe SQL and DuckDB’s extensions as “pure gold,” and someone even celebrated learning the mysterious origin of the name (no spoilers, but the duck lore runs deep). Meanwhile, the course itself—built by professor Torsten Grust—promises a 15-week tour through how queries get fast, how giant tables get sorted, how indexes work, and how the engine rewrites your questions to run quicker. Slides are on GitHub, but the lack of video lectures became the plot twist. Bottom line: if you love handouts and nerdy deep dives, feast away. If you need a bingeable video series, bring snacks and check DuckDB while you wait.
Key Points
- •A 15‑week undergraduate course on database system internals is built around DuckDB.
- •Lecture slides and auxiliary materials are available in a GitHub repository.
- •Developed by Torsten Grust for the University of Tübingen’s Database Research Group.
- •The syllabus (as of March 2026) covers memory management, sorting, indexing, query planning, vectorization, and optimization.
- •Basic SQL knowledge is required; a companion “Tabular Database Systems” course is suggested for newcomers.