DuckDB 1.4 support ends 17 November as 2.0 LTS ships

DuckDB 1.4 support ends 17 November as 2.0 LTS ships

21 October 2026: DuckDB 2.0.0, released by the DuckDB team as its new long-term support version, starts the clock on the previous one: community support for DuckDB 1.4 LTS ends on 17 November 2026, less than four weeks away. Teams on 1.4 can move to 2.0, supported until at least October 2027, or to 1.5, whose support has been extended to March 2027 to give them time to test.

Three support windows to plan around

Version	Status	Supported until
1.4	LTS, extended	17 November 2026
1.5	extended, effectively LTS	March 2027
2.0	LTS	at least October 2027

Since 1.4.0 every other DuckDB release is an LTS edition with a year of community support. Both 1.4 and 1.5 are exceptions: 1.4 was given until 17 November and 1.5, normally a short-lived release, was stretched to March 2027, which the team says it did "to ensure a smooth transition".

The storage format is the trap

The announcement is direct about the main risk. DuckDB versions before 2.0 cannot read database files created by 2.0, while 2.0 still reads and writes older files and leaves them readable by older versions. In a deployment where several processes or services open the same files, upgrading one writer to 2.0 can produce files that the others, still on 1.x, cannot open. The team recommends testing on a shadow system before switching production, and suggests mission-critical workloads wait for the first patch release, due in November, which sits close to the 1.4 cut-off.

For a team on 1.4 that cannot validate 2.0 before 17 November, moving to 1.5 first keeps it on a supported release with the old file format until March 2027.

Other changes that affect upgrades

• Parser: DuckDB's own PEG-based SQL parser becomes the default in place of the one derived from PostgreSQL's. It is designed to be compatible apart from a few listed changes, and SET enable_legacy_parser = true; switches back through the legacy_parser extension.
• Builds: the amalgamation build, which packs the whole source into one header and one source file, is deprecated.
• Platforms: community extensions are no longer built for osx_amd64, Intel Macs, and DuckDB 2.1 will stop supporting the platform.

2.0 itself is the project's largest feature release, built from close to 20,000 commits since 1.5: the Quack client-server protocol, asynchronous I/O for Parquet, CSV and native files on object storage, a fully integrated VARIANT type, triggers and an extensible parser.

Related on TrustList:

• Allstate unit Arity agrees to buy traffic data firm INRIX's assets
• Databricks variant shredding will lock Runtime 15.4 out of new tables
• PostgreSQL 19 now due on 19 November after late feature reverts

Sources

• DuckDB: Announcing DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS "Cinnamon Teal", 21 October 2026
• DuckDB: Release calendar (read 2026-10-23), 23 October 2026