duckdb

DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. It is designed to support analytical query workloads and is optimized for fast query execution. This repository contains the R bindings for DuckDB.

Installation from CRAN

This is the recommended method for recent R versions on Windows or macOS which have binaries available on CRAN.

install.packages("duckdb")

For Linux or older R versions, installing the package from source may take up to an hour. Consider the Posit Public Package Manager or r-universe for binary installs (see the next sections).

Installation from the Posit Public Package Manager

This repository serves binary builds of CRAN packages for a wide variety of platforms. Follow setup instructions from https://p3m.dev/client/#/repos/cran/setup. For example, to install the ManyLinux version of duckdb that is likely to work on your Linux, use:

install.packages("duckdb", repos = sprintf(
  "https://p3m.dev/cran/latest/bin/linux/manylinux_2_28-%s/%s", R.version["arch"], substr(getRversion(), 1, 3)
))

To check the availability of binaries for your platform, navigate to the duckdb search page.

Installation from r-universe

This repository serves development versions. Binaries are available for recent versions of R and for some platforms. Review https://docs.r-universe.dev/install/binaries.html for configuring installation of binary packages on Linux.

install.packages("duckdb", repos = c("https://duckdb.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

Installing the package from source may take up to an hour.

Installation from GitHub

# install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf("https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/stable/%s/%s/%s", .Platform$pkgType, R.Version()$os, R.Version()$arch))
pak::pak("duckdb/duckdb-r")

Installing the package from GitHub may take up to an hour.

Flavors

The sources in this repository are published under several names — duckdb on CRAN, and every flavor on r-universe. The .dev flavors are created by an automated vendoring process; the CRAN and LTS flavors always point at a stable upstream release.

The badges track each .dev series: ahead counts commits ahead of the branch the series releases from, in flight counts commits in CI but not yet trusted, buffered counts commits vendored but not yet verified. See the handbook's branches/ for the full model.

User Guide

See the R API in the DuckDB documentation.

Documentation

Everything this repository documents is reachable from the handbook, a strict topic hierarchy; AGENTS.md is the door for maintainers and coding agents, and plan/README.md names the designs, plans, and historical documents. BRANCHES.md and scripts/VENDORING.md hold detail the handbook is still absorbing.

Building

To build the R package, you first need to clone this repository and install the dependencies:

# install.packages("pak", repos = sprintf("https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak/stable/%s/%s/%s", .Platform$pkgType, R.Version()$os, R.Version()$arch))
pak::pak()

Then, install:

~duckdb-r: R CMD INSTALL .

Set the MAKEFLAGS environment variable to -j8 or similar for parallel builds. Configure ccache for faster repeated builds. A build that links a prebuilt engine and finishes in seconds, and other details, are described in the handbook under build/.

Vendoring

This package includes a vendored copy of the DuckDB C++ library. The vendoring process is automated — a scheduled routine synchronizes each release series with the upstream DuckDB repository, commit by commit. How it works, and how to vendor by hand, is in the handbook under operations/vendoring/.

Contributors

Thanks to all contributors to this repository, and to those who contributed when the code was still hosted in the main duckdb/duckdb repository:

Mark Raasveldt, Pedro Holanda, Tom Ebergen, Reijo Sund, Nicolas Bennett, Patrik Schratz, Tishj, Laurens Kuiper, Sam Ansmink, Andy Teucher, Hadley Wickham, Jonathan Keane, Lindsay Wray, Richard Wesley, Elliana May, Edwin de Jonge, Dewey Dunnington, Carlo Piovesan, Andre Beckedorf, Tania Bogatsch, Pedro Ferreira, Maximilian Girlich, James Lamb, James Atkins, usurai, Ubuntu, Noam Ross, Michael Antonov, Jeroen Ooms, Jamie Lentin, Jacob, and Chilarai.