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Design and Implementation of DuckDB Internals

Torsten Grust (University of Tubingen)
2026-03-19

This is a DuckDB-based course explaining the Design and
Implementation of Database System Internals ("DiDi"). The slides and
auxiliary material are available in the GitHub repository.

Overview

This lecture material has been developed by Torsten Grust to support
a 15-week course for undergraduate students of the Database Research
Group at University of Tubingen (Germany).

A Tour Through DuckDB's Internals

The course treads on a path through selected internals of the DuckDB
relational database system. 15 weeks do not suffice to exhaustively
discuss all interesting bits and pieces of the DuckDB kernel. As of
March 2026, the chapter layout reads as follows:

 1. Welcome & Setup
 2. The Query Performance Spectrum
 3. Managing Memory + Grouped Aggregation
 4. Sorting Large Tables
 5. The ART of Indexing
 6. Query Execution Plans and Pipelining
 7. Vectorized Query Execution
 8. Query Rewriting and Optimization

(You can also download the DiDi slides concatenated into a single
deck)

You will need basic SQL skills to follow the course's red thread and
auxiliary material. There are few queries that go beyond the core
SELECT-FROM-WHERE-GROUP BY-HAVING block, however. Should you require
an introduction to the tabular data model and its query language SQL,
you may find the companion course Tabular Database Systems helpful.

In this article

  * Overview
  * A Tour Through DuckDB's Internals

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