From Postgres to a Minimalist Lakehouse: The Next Step with DuckLake

Most teams start their analytics in Postgres. It works great — until queries get too heavy, datasets grow too large, and the transactional database is no longer the right tool for reporting. The typical advice? Move to complex lakehouse systems like Iceberg or Delta Lake. But for many teams, that's overkill: more tooling, more orchestration, and often more complexity than insights. In this presentation, we introduce DuckLake, a new open table format from the creators of DuckDB. DuckLake represents the logical next step after Postgres: a minimalist lakehouse that is SQL-native, cloud-ready, and far simpler than traditional data lake architectures. We will walk through: why scaling beyond Postgres doesn't require Spark or heavyweight catalogs, how to move data into DuckLake in minutes, not weeks, and a live demo! Whether you're a data engineer, analytics engineer, or a solo developer, you'll leave with a pragmatic, lightweight path for taking your analytics beyond Postgres — without losing power.