Introducing Flights: agent-native data pipelines in MotherDuckJoin the livestream

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Rill Data

Rill Data is a data platform for building and visualizing data. It integrates with MotherDuck for dashboards, semantic models, and embedded analytics workflows.

How it works with MotherDuck​

Rill can use MotherDuck as the OLAP engine that powers Rill dashboards. This is useful when your dashboard data already lives in MotherDuck and you do not want to ingest it into a separate Rill-managed engine.

Prerequisites​

  • Rill Developer or Rill Cloud.
  • A MotherDuck access token.
  • The MotherDuck database path and schema Rill should use.

Setup​

  1. In MotherDuck, create an access token for Rill.

  2. In Rill Developer, add MotherDuck as an OLAP connection through Add Data.

  3. Rill creates a connector file such as motherduck.yaml and stores MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN in .env.

  4. Configure the connector with an md: path and schema:

    type: connector
    driver: duckdb
    token: "{{ .env.MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN }}"
    path: "md:my_database"
    schema_name: "my_schema"

  5. Set the project's olap_connector to the MotherDuck connector.

Authentication and configuration​

  • Keep MOTHERDUCK_TOKEN in .env or your Rill Cloud environment variables.
  • Use rill env push when deploying a project that already has the token in the local project environment.
  • Use the Rill connector YAML reference for optional connector parameters.

Important notes​

  • Creating a MotherDuck OLAP connection changes the project's default OLAP engine to MotherDuck.
  • Metrics view SQL should use DuckDB-compatible syntax because Rill sends dashboard queries to MotherDuck.

Use cases​

  • Build fast dashboards on existing MotherDuck tables.
  • Use MotherDuck as a bring-your-own OLAP engine for Rill.
  • Deploy the same Rill project locally and in Rill Cloud with environment-managed credentials.

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