The DuckDB driver conforms to the built-in database/sql interface.

go get github.com/marcboeker/go-duckdb

go-duckdb uses CGO to make calls to DuckDB. You must build your binaries with CGO_ENABLED=1.

go-duckdb hooks into the database/sql interface provided by the Go stdlib. To open a connection, simply specify the driver type as duckdb:

db, err := sql.Open("duckdb", "")

This creates an in-memory instance of DuckDB. If you would like to store the data on the filesystem, you need to specify the path where to store the database:

db, err := sql.Open("duckdb", "/path/to/foo.db")

If you want to set specific config options for DuckDB, you can add them as query style parameters in the form of name=value to the DSN, like:

db, err := sql.Open("duckdb", "/path/to/foo.db?access_mode=read_only&threads=4")

Alternatively, you can also use sql.OpenDB when you want to perform some initialization before the connection is created and returned from the connection pool on call to db.Conn. Here's an example that installs and loads the JSON extension for each connection:

connector, err := duckdb.NewConnector("/path/to/foo.db?access_mode=read_only&threads=4", func(execer driver.Execer) error {
  bootQueries := []string{
    "INSTALL 'json'",
    "LOAD 'json'",
  }

  for _, qry := range bootQueries {
    _, err = execer.Exec(qry, nil)
    if err != nil {
      return err
    }
  }
  return nil
})
if err != nil {
  return nil, err
}

db := sql.OpenDB(connector)
db.SetMaxOpenConns(poolsize)
...

Please refer to the database/sql GoDoc for further usage instructions.

If you want to use the DuckDB Appender API, you can obtain a new Appender by supplying a DuckDB connection to NewAppenderFromConn().

connector, err := NewConnector("test.db", nil)
if err != {
  ...
}
conn, err := connector.Connect(context.Background())
if err != {
  ...
}
defer conn.Close()

// Retrieve appender from connection.
appender, err := NewAppenderFromConn(conn, "", "test")
if err != {
  ...
}
defer appender.Close()

err = appender.AppendRow(...)
if err != {
  ...
}

// Optional, if you want to access the appended rows immediately.
err = appender.Flush()
if err != {
  ...
}

By default, go-duckdb statically links DuckDB into your binary. Statically linking DuckDB adds around 30 MB to your binary size. On Linux (Intel) and macOS (Intel and ARM), go-duckdb bundles pre-compiled static libraries for fast builds. On other platforms, it falls back to compiling DuckDB from source, which takes around 10 minutes. You can force go-duckdb to build DuckDB from source by passing -tags=duckdb_from_source to go build.

Alternatively, you can dynamically link DuckDB by passing -tags=duckdb_use_lib to go build. You must have a copy of libduckdb available on your system (.so on Linux or .dylib on macOS), which you can download from the DuckDB releases page. For example:

# On Linux
CGO_ENABLED=1 CGO_LDFLAGS="-L/path/to/libs" go build -tags=duckdb_use_lib main.go
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/libs ./main

# On macOS
CGO_ENABLED=1 CGO_LDFLAGS="-L/path/to/libs" go build -tags=duckdb_use_lib main.go
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/libs ./main