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")

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

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