Building the MotherDuck Partner Ecosystem

At MotherDuck, we are building a serverless data platform - one in which a plethora of user types collaborate on a multitude of use cases, all on securely shared data. Thus it’s simply imperative for MotherDuck users to be able to bring their own best-in-class tooling and use them with MotherDuck. Users win big when they can use their familiar choices of orchestration, integration, or visualization tool - and it allows them to start seeing value in our produck sooner.

Our combined experiences at Looker, Google BigQuery, and Firebolt told us that, as an upstart, getting third-party vendors to work with you can be challenging. Not only is it difficult to develop high-quality integrations; companies must bet that the effort will pay off and hence look for proof of immediate ROI. So as a pre-market company, we planned an optimistic goal of delivering a total of 5 partner integrations by the end of June 2023. Along the way, a funny thing happened and we ended up launching with 17 ecosystem partners! How did that happen?

Paddling in DuckDB’s wake

Naturally we love DuckDB; it’s the most exciting analytics database in years! It’s fast, lightweight, highly portable, and free. DuckDB is rapidly growing in popularity, having recently eclipsed ten thousand Github stars and one million Python downloads per month. Perhaps most importantly, and rather uniquely, DuckDB enables developers to do with data what they naturally do with code - work locally on their laptops.

DuckDB buzz permeates the data industry: when we reached out to partners, folks routinely voiced that “they already have several DuckDB fans in their company”. Many actually already supported DuckDB, and some even use DuckDB in their stack as a cache or a batch processing engine. Talk about paddling in DuckDB’s wake - partners are excited to work with us in large part thanks to the momentum of DuckDB.

The magic of “.open md:”

DuckDB is incredible in its own right, and our primary goal at MotherDuck is to supercharge your DuckDB with the power of cloud. So, with big help from the folks over at DuckDB Labs, we built an easy way for any DuckDB user to connect to MotherDuck. You simply run open md:!

Some of the things you can do with MotherDuck are:

• Share your DuckDB databases with your friends and colleagues
• Persist your data in the cloud
• Query Amazon S3 easier, faster, and more securely
• Use “Hybrid Execution” to query data wherever it lives
• Use MotherDuck’s web UI to analyze your data

We asked partners who already supported DuckDB to try connecting to MotherDuck using open md:. Things. Just. Worked. With a single line of code (and an auth token), they were talking to the MotherDuck service!

Expanding the duck pond

Here are some examples of the diverse things you can do with our ecosystem today:

Quack into action

Whether you’re a potential user or partner, we’d love to hear from you:

• Join our community Slack, introduce yourself, and let us know if you need help!
• Request an invite for MotherDuck Beta.
• Try MotherDuck with some of the third party tools and give us feedback.
• …and if you’re a partner and want to work with us, quack at us!