I built a distributed DuckDB setup using OpenRaft for state replication. Every node holds a full copy of the database. Writes go through Raft consensus, reads are local. It's more like etcd-with-DuckDB than MotherDuck-lite.

OpenDuck takes a different approach with query federation with a gateway that splits execution across local and remote workers. My use case requires every node to serve reads independently with zero network latency, and to keep running if other nodes go down.

The PostgreSQL dependency for metadata feels heavy. Now you're operating two database systems instead of one. In my setup DuckDB stores both the Raft log and the application data, so there's a single storage engine to reason about.

Not saying my approach is universally better. If you need to query across datasets that don't fit on a single machine, OpenDuck's architecture makes more sense. But if you want replicated state with strong consistency, Raft + DuckDB works very well.