Announcing DuckDB 1.5.4 Variegata

DuckDB 1.5.4 (Variegata) has been released as the fifth patch in the 1.5 line. The release focuses on bugfixes, performance improvements, and security patches. Key correctness fixes include VARIANT cast row filtering, MERGE INTO binding logic, and case-insensitive column matching in INSERT...SELECT ON CONFLICT. Crash fixes address a double free in Arrow GeoArrow CRS serialization, gzip compression write overflow, and storage path issues. JSON handling bugs were also resolved. Performance improvements include heap trimming on jemalloc builds and better Parquet stats pruning for geometry data. Miscellaneous additions include dark/light mode CLI options and hardening of Parquet decompression paths. The team also teased DuckDB v2.0.0 for fall.