The Database Inside Your Lakehouse: A DuckLake Architecture Deep Dive

Most people using DuckLake know what it does. Fewer know how it actually works under the hood - and that gap matters when you're running it in production . In this session, Alex Monahan goes inside DuckLake's architecture: how the catalog, storage, and compute layers are designed, why separating them is a deliberate choice rather than an implementation detail, and what that design means for how DuckLake handles reads, writes, and query planning. This session is based on Chapter 3 of DuckLake: The Definitive Guide, published with O'Reilly.