Engineering Articles

Performance, Engineering, Open Source

MATCH_RECOGNIZE That Scales

Why funnels belong in MATCH_RECOGNIZE, how active-run automata get expensive, and how our DuckDB extension stays fast against Trino.

Altertable Agent, Architecture, Engineering

JULY 22ND, 2026

Florian Valeye

Hand the Agent a Map

Search finds a match, not its context. Altertable's ontology and live entity graph let agents navigate to the evidence, one hop at a time.

JULY 21ST, 2026

The DuckDB Bet

DuckDB is showing up in warehouses, product-serving paths, and database servers. The shift is flexible execution without a central data copy.

JULY 20TH, 2026

Data Warehouses & Lakehouses in 2026

A practical 2026 comparison of warehouses and lakehouses, from Snowflake and BigQuery to Databricks, DuckDB, and Altertable.

JULY 15TH, 2026

Lakehouse as Context Store

Why the lakehouse becomes the working context store for agents: live data, telemetry, definitions, and company knowledge in one governed foundation.

JUNE 30TH, 2026

Stack Drift

Why mature data stacks keep accumulating copy layers, and how direct relational federation gives dbt a simpler path over live operational sources.

Architecture, Altertable Agent, Engineering

MAY 25TH, 2026

Florian Valeye

Let Agents Render the Platform

Charts, queries, and interactive UI now render inside AI agents through MCP Apps—the same components as altertable.ai.

Altertable Agent, Architecture, Engineering

MAY 18TH, 2026

Florian Valeye

Memory Is Not a Database

Intelligence without memory is nothing. The right model is memory that lives, forgets, and knows where it belongs.

Product, Engineering, Data Stack

MAY 13TH, 2026

Yannick Utard

Introducing Altertable Workers

Most data platforms ask you to send the data to them. Altertable Workers flip that model; the runtime moves to where the data already lives.

APRIL 14TH, 2026

Product, Engineering, Data Stack

Lakehouse table formats in 2026

There is no single “winning” lakehouse table format in 2026. What has emerged instead is a more interesting split.

MARCH 27TH, 2026

Product, Performance, Engineering

Grep your lakehouse

Agents fail when they cannot retrieve the right data slice before writing SQL—not because they cannot generate queries.

MARCH 10TH, 2026

Product, Performance, Engineering

AI's Event Backbone

AI-native products generate a new kind of infrastructure problem. Here's how to build the event backbone for your AI system.

FEBRUARY 17TH, 2026

Product, Performance, Engineering

One Billion Rows

At 1 billion rows, every shortcut comes back to collect interest. Here's how we achieved sub-second queries with near-realtime ingestion.

Architecture, Engineering

JANUARY 20TH, 2026

Yannick Utard

Upside-Down Architecture

Most analytics queries scan <100MB. We explore a hybrid architecture where compute moves between servers and your local machine, powered by DuckDB and DuckLake.

JANUARY 13TH, 2026

Performance, Architecture, Engineering

Lessons from Search

Real-time analytics faces the small-file problem search engines solved. DuckLake's tiered compaction brings those merge strategies to streaming analytics.

OCTOBER 21ST, 2025

From STDIO to OAuth

Engineering, Open Source

How MCP evolved from local stdio to OAuth 2.0 for cloud-scale AI, using Dynamic Client Registration for secure agent access.

SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2025

NetQuack 4000x Faster

Performance, Engineering

We rewrote NetQuack DuckDB extension, replacing regex with character parsing. Result: 4000x faster—37 seconds down to 0.012 seconds.

SEPTEMBER 23RD, 2025

Open Source, Engineering, Altertable Agent

Upstreaming with AI

How we contributed 17 upstream PRs in 90 days—where AI accelerated our workflow, what we learned, and practical tips for open source success with AI assistance.

JULY 15TH, 2025

Altertable Agent, Architecture, Engineering

Under the Hood: Agents

Altertable agents think ahead. Powered by custom lakehouse and MCP, they monitor, investigate, and act on your data autonomously.

JUNE 17TH, 2025

Relearning the Craft

Culture, Engineering

AI-first development changed everything—prompts are code, green CI means nothing. Here's how we're adapting and relearning.

JUNE 10TH, 2025

Architecture, Engineering

Behind the Stack

Our tech stack: Rails for backend velocity, Rust for high-performance ingestion, React and Urql for UIs, Iceberg for data lake, Trino for federated queries.