MotherDuck

Connect & Ingest data from / to a MotherDuck database

Setup

The following credentials keys are accepted:

• database (required) -> The motherduck database name

• motherduck_token (required) -> The service token. See here for instructions on getting it.

• schema (optional) -> The default schema to use.

• duckdb_version (optional) -> The CLI version of DuckDB to use. You can also specify the env. variable DUCKDB_VERSION.

• read_only (optional) -> Whether to open the connection in readonly mode. Accepts true or false. Default is false.

• interactive (optional) -> Whether to communicate to the DuckDB CLI via interactive mode instead of reopening the connection each time. Accepts true or false. Default is true.

• motherduck_attach_mode (optional v1.4.24+) -> Whether to set MotherDuck Attach Mode. Accepts workspace or single.

• copy_format (optional v1.6.4+) -> the data format that Sling uses to move data between Sling and DuckDB, for reads and writes. Acceptable values: arrow, csv. Default is arrow. Arrow needs the DuckDB arrow community extension. If DuckDB cannot load this extension (for example, with no internet access), Sling uses csv. If you have issues with arrow, set csv.

• copy_method (deprecated) -> use copy_format. arrow_http becomes arrow. All other values become csv.

• max_buffer_size (optional v1.5) -> the max buffer size to use when piping data from DuckDB CLI. Specify this if you have extremely large one-line text values in your dataset. Default is 10485760 (10MB).

• max_line_size (optional v1.5.25+) -> the max line size (in bytes) to use when piping CSV data into DuckDB. Sling raises this to 268435456 (256MB) when the data has string, text, json or binary columns, and uses 2000000 (2MB) otherwise. Specify this only if a single row is larger than 256MB.

Using sling conns

Here are examples of setting a connection named MOTHERDUCK. We must provide the type=motherduck property:

$ sling conns set MOTHERDUCK type=motherduck database=my_db motherduck_token=xxxxxxxxxxxx

# Or use url
$ sling conns set MOTHERDUCK url="motherduck://my_db?motherduck_token=xxxxxxxxxxxx"

Environment Variable

See here to learn more about the .env.sling file.

export MOTHERDUCK='motherduck://my_db?motherduck_token=xxxxxxxxxxxx'
export MOTHERDUCK='{ type: motherduck, database: "my_db", motherduck_token: "xxxxxxxxxxxx" }'

Sling Env File YAML

See here to learn more about the sling env.yaml file.

connections:
  MOTHERDUCK:
    type: motherduck
    database: <database>
    motherduck_token: <motherduck_token>
    schema: <schema>
    duckdb_version: '<duckdb_version>'
    copy_format: arrow

Specifying a DuckDB version

If you would like to use a specific DuckDB version, you can specify this way:

export DUCKDB_VERSION='0.7.0'

If you are facing issues connecting, give sling assist a try, or reach out to us at [e-mail], on discord or open a Github Issue here.

Potential Issue

If you have a .duckdbrc file, which runs commands whenever the DuckDB CLI is invoked, this may interfere with normal Sling operation. If you are facing weird issues and have this file, try again after deleting it.