What is quacklake?

Quacklake is a TypeScript service that runs on Cloudflare's serverless infrastructure and acts as a gateway for a database tool called DuckDB. DuckDB has an experimental network protocol called Quack that lets clients connect to it over HTTP, and quacklake implements that protocol so clients can query data stored on Cloudflare's platform. The service stores metadata about data catalogs using Cloudflare Durable Objects, which are small databases tied to a specific Cloudflare location. When a user connects, they provide a security token (a JWT) that the service verifies before granting access to a catalog. Catalog owners can define authorization policies that control exactly which SQL queries a given user can run or which data they can read. On the storage side, quacklake is designed to work with DuckLake, a file-based data catalog format. Actual data files live in Cloudflare R2, which is an object storage service similar to Amazon S3. The service manages file inventory and can grant clients temporary access to read those files directly, without routing all data through the Worker itself. Because quacklake runs on Cloudflare's edge network rather than a traditional server, there is no persistent process to manage or scale. The README is explicit that this is an alpha project suited for protocol integration work and smoke testing, not production data workloads. DuckDB's full SQL behavior and complete DuckLake compliance are not yet implemented. The intended audience is developers who want to expose DuckDB-accessible data through Cloudflare's infrastructure with access control, or who are building tooling on top of the Quack protocol. The repository includes detailed guides for authentication setup, local development, and integration with identity providers like AWS Cognito and Microsoft Entra ID.