We are releasing DuckDB version v1.5.3. Despite being a “patch release”, it ships a ton of features through its extensions, starting with Quack, which is now available as a core extension, support for Quack in DuckLake, and several new features for Iceberg, AWS and HTTPS.

DuckDB

DuckDB v1.5.3 is a patch release that ships significant new features via extensions. The headline addition is Quack, a new remote client-server protocol now available as a core extension that auto-installs and auto-loads on first use. DuckLake now supports Quack as its catalog database. The AWS extension gains web_identity chain support for IRSA and IAM authentication for RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL. The HTTPS extension now respects the HTTP_PROXY environment variable for proxied environments. The Iceberg extension receives major updates including MERGE INTO support, INSERT/UPDATE on partitioned tables, CTAS via ADBC, ALTER TABLE support, GEOMETRY type support, and new schema property management functions. Internally, jemalloc is now statically linked into core DuckDB on Linux rather than shipped as an extension.

DuckDB 1.5.3: Not an Ordinary Patch Release