DuckDB is an open-source in-process SQL OLAP database management system designed to provide fast, scalable, and efficient data processing for analytical and data-heavy applications, featuring a small memory footprint and powerful SQL querying capabilities. MotherDuck is a managed DuckDB-in-the-cloud service recently released that allows users to enrich their local DuckDB experience with cloud-based manageability, persistence, scale, sharing, and productivity tools.

While Apache Superset has supported DuckDB since last year, the embedded database was still not available on Preset for security considerations, since it could potentially have access to the filesystem of the workspace. This changed with the release of MotherDuck, though, which allows users to run queries on the cloud. Because of this, we wanted to have DuckDB and MotherDuck available to our users in a secure and efficient way, from day one, and we’re proud to announce that you can now use Preset to access any MotherDuck manager database.

Connecting Preset to MotherDuck

The first step is creating an account on MotherDuck. After signing up and familiarizing yourself with MotherDuck you should copy the service token from your personal account:

With the token in hand, go to Preset and under Settings → Database Connections add a new database. Choose DuckDB for the type, and the following for its URI:

duckdb:///md:**${TOKEN}**@**${database_name}**

Where ${TOKEN} is your MotherDuck token, and ${database_name} is the name of the database you want to connect to. The database configuration in Preset should look like this:

Now you can run queries from SQL Lab and create charts from datasets:

And that’s basically all there is to it — we were not kidding when we said this was the easiest way! Once you’ve connected Preset to MotherDuck you can access all the databases and tables there, as well as use DuckDB extensions to query data stored in S3.