Fast DuckDB-Powered Dashboards with Rill and MotherDuck
The excitement and momentum for DuckDB continues to grow, most recently with the announcement of MotherDuck’s cloud-based serverless analytics platform. At Rill, we’ve been longtime fans of DuckDB, in fact it’s the engine that powers auto-profiling and interactive modeling in Rill Developer, and the dashboards in Rill Cloud.
We talk about all the reasons we love DuckDB and why we believe it has rightfully emerged as the standard for analytical databases. It’s those same reasons that made the decision to partner with MotherDuck and build a native integration that gives users an easy path from cloud database to exploratory dashboard. MotherDuck is the fastest, easiest way to run DuckDB in the cloud, and we want to empower users to just as easily build data visualizations and dashboards with just a few clicks.
How the Rill Integration Works
Creating fast, exploratory dashboards with Rill starts with downloading and installing the open-source software to your local machine. Start a new Rill project, ingest your data, and use the app to model your data and visualize it in a dashboard.
In addition to ingesting data from an S3 or GCP bucket, Rill users can now ingest data directly from their MotherDuck instance. Users will follow the same basic steps that include
- downloading and installing Rill
- configuring MotherDuck as a source
- entering a SQL expression to return a single table and clicking import
Because Rill is already built with DuckDB embedded, no additional type wrangling is needed, the data in MotherDuck is “production-ready” for Rill dashboards. Developers using MotherDuck can seamlessly plug their data into Rill’s business intelligence tool to build and deploy fast, exploratory dashboards that deliver fast insights.
Today Rill supports reading from MotherDuck as a source, we are considering several avenues to expand the integration in the future, including potentially writing to MotherDuck as a destination, so that any transformations or measure expressions defined in Rill’s metrics layer are directly query-able in MotherDuck.
A Growing Ecosystem
DuckDB’s unique features – its speed, SQL dialect, and embeddability – make it a disruptive technology with potential use cases ranging from serverless pipelines to interactive data applications. But like any technology, it cannot succeed alone. There must be an ecosystem of tools that interoperate with DuckDB to fill out these use cases. We’re glad to be part of this thriving community.
We are equally thrilled that Rill has been included among an impressive list of technology solutions within the ecosystem of MotherDuck partners. By partnering with MotherDuck, Rill’s objective is to provide the DuckDB community a first-class business intelligence stack. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the MotherDuck team and greater DuckDB community.
See for yourself how easy it is to build fast, exploratory dashboards with your MotherDuck data, and join the Rill community to get your questions answered or share your feedback. We look forward to connecting with you!
