# DuckDB v1.5.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** DuckDB (https://duckdb.org)
- **Version:** v1.5.0
- **Released:** Mar 09, 2026
- **Impact Score:** 5/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/duckdb/updates/v1.5.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
DuckDB v1.5.0. Source highlight: This release of DuckDB is named "Variegata" after the paradise shelduck Tadorna Variegata, also known as the paradise duck, a species of Shelduck (a group of goose-like ducks), endemic to New Zealand.

## New Features
- Add support for `read_duckdb` - a function that allows reading / globbing DuckDB database files
- Add support for late materialization and filter pushdown to read_duckdb
- Move storage block prefetching to an option instead of baking in testing during ALTERNATIVE_VERIFY + add a test config for this option
- Introduce `parser_override_function_t`
- Add more missing error messages to test cases
- [Profiling] Add QueryContext to more functions, for Reads

## Improvements
- Perform deduplication based on join_keys when building ht
- Perform optimistic reads while filling gaps in CachingFileSystem
- [C API] Improve documentation on list vectors
- Make cached hashes thread-safe and emit dictionary vectors from Perfect Hash Join
- `CommonSubplan` improvements
- Internal #4490: DENSE_RANK Performance

## Bug Fixes
- Fix query() function error message for PIVOT statements without explicit IN clauses
- Fix field id uniqueness for alter database
- Fix unused variable warnings
- Tiny fix for ColumnDataAllocator::ColumnDataAllocator
- Fixes for ALTER DATABASE - use serialization framework, and fix stringification of identifiers
- Fix union semantics in recursive CTEs