The lakehouse promised to unify our data, but popular formats can feel bloated and hard to use for most real-world workloads. If you've ever felt that the complexity and operational overhead of "Big Data" tools are overkill, you're not alone. What if your lakehouse could be simple, fast, and maybe even a little fun? Enter DuckLake , the native lakehouse format, managed on MotherDuck. It delivers the powerful features you need like ACID transactions, time travel, and schema evolution without the heavyweight baggage. This approach truly makes massive data sets feel like Small Data. This workshop is a practical, step-by-step walkthrough for the data practitioner. We'll get straight to the point and show you how to build a fully functional, serverless lakehouse from scratch. You will learn: The Architecture: We’ll explore how DuckLake's design choices make it fundamentally simpler and faster for analytical queries compared to its JVM-based cousins. The Workflow: Through hands-on examples, you'll create a DuckLake table, perform atomic updates, and use time travel—all with the simple SQL you already know. The MotherDuck Advantage: Discover how the serverless platform makes it easy to manage, share, and query your DuckLake tables, enabling a seamless hybrid workflow between your laptop and the cloud.

Easy, fast, and scalable: pick 3. MotherDuck’s managed DuckLake data lakehouse blends the cost efficiency, scale, and openness of a lakehouse with the speed of a warehouse for truly joyful dbt pipelines. We will show you how!

DuckDB is well-loved by SQL-ophiles to handle their small data workloads. How do you make it scale? What happens when you feed it Big Data? What is this DuckLake thing I've been hearing about? This talk will help answer these questions from real-world experience running a DuckDB service in the cloud.