How to load data from BigQuery to DuckDB

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your BigQuery data into DuckDB within minutes.

Try Airbyte Cloud

Get a demo

Building your pipeline or Using Airbyte

Airbyte is the only open solution empowering data teams to meet all their growing custom business demands in the new AI era.

Building in-house pipelines

Bespoke pipelines are:

Inconsistent and inaccurate data
Laborious and expensive
Brittle and inflexible

Furthermore, you will need to build and maintain Y x Z pipelines with Y sources and Z destinations to cover all your needs.

After Airbyte

Airbyte connections are:

Reliable and accurate
Extensible and scalable for all your needs
Deployed and governed your way

All your pipelines in minutes, however custom they are, thanks to Airbyte’s connector marketplace and Connector Builder.

Start syncing with Airbyte in 3 easy steps within 10 minutes

Set up a BigQuery connector in Airbyte

Connect to BigQuery or one of 400+ pre-built or 10,000+ custom connectors through simple account authentication.

Set up DuckDB for your extracted BigQuery data

Select DuckDB where you want to import data from your BigQuery source to. You can also choose other cloud data warehouses, databases, data lakes, vector databases, or any other supported Airbyte destinations.

Configure the BigQuery to DuckDB in Airbyte

This includes selecting the data you want to extract - streams and columns -, the sync frequency, where in the destination you want that data to be loaded.

Try Airbyte Cloud

Take a virtual tour

Check out our interactive demo and our how-to videos to learn how you can sync data from any source to any destination.

Demo video of Airbyte Cloud

Demo video of AI Connector Builder

Talk to our team

Old Automated Content

TL;DR

set up BigQuery as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up DuckDB as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is BigQuery

BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehousing and analytics platform that allows users to store, manage, and analyze large amounts of data in real-time. It is a fully managed service that eliminates the need for users to manage their own infrastructure, and it offers a range of features such as SQL querying, machine learning, and data visualization. BigQuery is designed to handle petabyte-scale datasets and can be used for a variety of use cases, including business intelligence, data exploration, and predictive analytics. It is a powerful tool for organizations looking to gain insights from their data and make data-driven decisions.

What is DuckDB

DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. It has strong support for SQL. DuckDB is borrowing the SQLite shell implementation. Each database is a single file on disk. It’s analogous to “ SQLite for analytical (OLAP) workloads” (direct comparison on the SQLite vs DuckDB paper here), whereas SQLite is for OLTP ones. But it can handle vast amounts of data locally. It’s the smaller, lighter version of Apache Druid and other OLAP technologies.

Integrate BigQuery with DuckDB in minutes

Try for free now

Prerequisites

A BigQuery account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A DuckDB account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that consolidates and streamlines the process of extracting and loading data from multiple data sources to data warehouses. It offers pre-built connectors, including BigQuery and DuckDB, for seamless data migration.

When using Airbyte to move data from BigQuery to DuckDB, it extracts data from BigQuery using the source connector, converts it into a format DuckDB can ingest using the provided schema, and then loads it into DuckDB via the destination connector. This allows businesses to leverage their BigQuery data for advanced analytics and insights within DuckDB, simplifying the ETL process and saving significant time and resources.

Step 1: Set up BigQuery as a source connector

1. First, you need to have a Google Cloud Platform account and a project with BigQuery enabled.

2. Go to the Google Cloud Console and create a new service account with the necessary permissions to access your BigQuery data.

3. Download the JSON key file for the service account and keep it safe.

4. Open Airbyte and go to the Sources page.

5. Click on the "Create a new source" button and select "BigQuery" from the list of available sources.

6. Enter a name for your source and click on "Next".

7. In the "Connection Configuration" section, enter the following information:
- Project ID: the ID of your Google Cloud Platform project
- JSON Key: copy and paste the contents of the JSON key file you downloaded earlier
- Dataset: the name of the dataset you want to connect to

8. Click on "Test Connection" to make sure everything is working correctly.

9. If the test is successful, click on "Create Source" to save your configuration.

10. You can now use your BigQuery source connector to extract data from your dataset and load it into Airbyte for further processing.

Step 2: Set up DuckDB as a destination connector

1. Open the Airbyte platform and navigate to the "Destinations" tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
2. Click on the "Add Destination" button located in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Scroll down the list of available destinations until you find "DuckDB" and click on it.
4. Fill in the required information for your DuckDB database, including the host, port, database name, username, and password.
5. Test the connection to ensure that the information you provided is correct and that Airbyte can successfully connect to your DuckDB database.
6. If the connection is successful, click on the "Save" button to save your DuckDB destination connector.
7. You can now use this connector to transfer data from your source connectors to your DuckDB database. Simply select the DuckDB destination connector when setting up your data integration pipelines in Airbyte.

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your BigQuery data to DuckDB

Once you've successfully connected BigQuery as a data source and DuckDB as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select BigQuery from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose DuckDB from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific BigQuery objects you want to import data from towards DuckDB. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from BigQuery to DuckDB according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your DuckDB data warehouse is always up-to-date with your BigQuery data.

Use Cases to transfer your BigQuery data to DuckDB

Integrating data from BigQuery to DuckDB provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

Advanced Analytics: DuckDB’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your BigQuery data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within BigQuery alone.
Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with BigQuery, syncing to DuckDB allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
Historical Data Analysis: BigQuery has limits on historical data. Syncing data to DuckDB allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
Data Security and Compliance: DuckDB provides robust data security features. Syncing BigQuery data to DuckDB ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
Scalability: DuckDB can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding BigQuery data.
Data Science and Machine Learning: By having BigQuery data in DuckDB, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
Reporting and Visualization: While BigQuery provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to DuckDB, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a BigQuery table that needs to be converted to a DuckDB table, Airbyte can do that automatically.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, this tutorial has shown you how to:

Configure a BigQuery account as an Airbyte data source connector.
Configure DuckDB as a data destination connector.
Create an Airbyte data pipeline that will automatically be moving data directly from BigQuery to DuckDB after you set a schedule

With Airbyte, creating data pipelines take minutes, and the data integration possibilities are endless. Airbyte supports the largest catalog of API tools, databases, and files, among other sources. Airbyte's connectors are open-source, so you can add any custom objects to the connector, or even build a new connector from scratch without any local dev environment or any data engineer within 10 minutes with the no-code connector builder.

We look forward to seeing you make use of it! We invite you to join the conversation on our community Slack Channel, or sign up for our newsletter. You should also check out other Airbyte tutorials, and Airbyte’s content hub!

What should you do next?

Hope you enjoyed the reading. Here are the 3 ways we can help you in your data journey:

Easily address your data movement needs with Airbyte Cloud

Take the first step towards extensible data movement infrastructure that will give a ton of time back to your data team.

Get started with Airbyte for free

Talk to a data infrastructure expert

Get a free consultation with an Airbyte expert to significantly improve your data movement infrastructure.

Talk to sales

Improve your data infrastructure knowledge

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and get the community’s new enlightening content along with Airbyte’s progress in their mission to solve data integration once and for all.

Subscribe to newsletter

What sets Airbyte Apart

Modern GenAI Workflows

Streamline AI workflows with Airbyte: load unstructured data into vector stores like Pinecone, Weaviate, and Milvus. Supports RAG transformations with LangChain chunking and embeddings from OpenAI, Cohere, etc., all in one operation.

Move Large Volumes, Fast

Quickly get up and running with a 5-minute setup that supports both incremental and full refreshes, for databases of any size.

An Extensible Open-Source Standard

More than 1,000 developers contribute to Airbyte’s connectors, different interfaces (UI, API, Terraform Provider, Python Library), and integrations with the rest of the stack. Airbyte’s Connector Builder lets you edit or add new connectors in minutes.

Full Control & Security

Airbyte secures your data with cloud-hosted, self-hosted or hybrid deployment options. Single Sign-On (SSO) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensure only authorized users have access with the right permissions. Airbyte acts as a HIPAA conduit and supports compliance with CCPA, GDPR, and SOC2.

Fully Featured & Integrated

Airbyte automates schema evolution for seamless data flow, and utilizes efficient Change Data Capture (CDC) for real-time updates. Select only the columns you need, and leverage our dbt integration for powerful data transformations.

Enterprise Support with SLAs

Airbyte Self-Managed Enterprise comes with dedicated support and guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs), ensuring that your data movement infrastructure remains reliable and performant, and expert assistance is available when needed.

What our users say

Jean-Mathieu Saponaro

Data & Analytics Senior Eng Manager

"The intake layer of Datadog’s self-serve analytics platform is largely built on Airbyte.Airbyte’s ease of use and extensibility allowed any team in the company to push their data into the platform - without assistance from the data team!"

Learn more

Chase Zieman

Chief Data Officer

“Airbyte helped us accelerate our progress by years, compared to our competitors. We don’t need to worry about connectors and focus on creating value for our users instead of building infrastructure. That’s priceless. The time and energy saved allows us to disrupt and grow faster.”

Learn more

Alexis Weill

Data Lead

“We chose Airbyte for its ease of use, its pricing scalability and its absence of vendor lock-in. Having a lean team makes them our top criteria. The value of being able to scale and execute at a high level by maximizing resources is immense”

Learn more

Sync with Airbyte

Step 1: Set up BigQuery as a source connector

1. First, you need to have a Google Cloud Platform account and a project with BigQuery enabled.

2. Go to the Google Cloud Console and create a new service account with the necessary permissions to access your BigQuery data.

3. Download the JSON key file for the service account and keep it safe.

4. Open Airbyte and go to the Sources page.

5. Click on the "Create a new source" button and select "BigQuery" from the list of available sources.

6. Enter a name for your source and click on "Next".

8. Click on "Test Connection" to make sure everything is working correctly.

9. If the test is successful, click on "Create Source" to save your configuration.

10. You can now use your BigQuery source connector to extract data from your dataset and load it into Airbyte for further processing.

Step 2: Set up DuckDB as a destination connector

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your BigQuery data to DuckDB

Once you've successfully connected BigQuery as a data source and DuckDB as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select BigQuery from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose DuckDB from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific BigQuery objects you want to import data from towards DuckDB. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from BigQuery to DuckDB according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your DuckDB data warehouse is always up-to-date with your BigQuery data.

How to Sync BigQuery to DuckDB Manually

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

Step 7:

Step 8:

FAQs

What is ETL?

ETL, an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load, is a vital data integration process. It involves extracting data from diverse sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a database, data warehouse or data lake. This process enables meaningful data analysis, enhancing business intelligence.

What is BigQuery?

What data can you extract from BigQuery?

BigQuery provides access to a wide range of data types, including:

1. Structured data: This includes data that is organized into tables with defined columns and data types, such as CSV, JSON, and Avro files.
2. Semi-structured data: This includes data that has some structure, but not necessarily a fixed schema, such as XML and JSON files.
3. Unstructured data: This includes data that has no predefined structure, such as text, images, and videos.
4. Time-series data: This includes data that is organized by time, such as stock prices, weather data, and sensor readings.
5. Geospatial data: This includes data that is related to geographic locations, such as maps, GPS coordinates, and spatial databases.
6. Machine learning data: This includes data that is used to train machine learning models, such as labeled datasets and feature vectors.
7. Streaming data: This includes data that is generated in real-time, such as social media feeds, IoT sensor data, and log files.

Overall, BigQuery's API provides access to a wide range of data types, making it a powerful tool for data analysis and machine learning.

How do I transfer data from BigQuery?

This can be done by building a data pipeline manually, usually a Python script (you can leverage a tool as Apache Airflow for this). This process can take more than a full week of development. Or it can be done in minutes on Airbyte in three easy steps:
1. Set up BigQuery to DuckDB as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
2. Choose a destination (more than 50 available destination databases, data warehouses or lakes) to sync data too and set it up as a destination connector
3. Define which data you want to transfer from BigQuery to DuckDB and how frequently
You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

What is ELT?

ELT, standing for Extract, Load, Transform, is a modern take on the traditional ETL data integration process. In ELT, data is first extracted from various sources, loaded directly into a data warehouse, and then transformed. This approach enhances data processing speed, analytical flexibility and autonomy.

Difference between ETL and ELT?

ETL and ELT are critical data integration strategies with key differences. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) transforms data before loading, ideal for structured data. In contrast, ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) loads data before transformation, perfect for processing large, diverse data sets in modern data warehouses. ELT is becoming the new standard as it offers a lot more flexibility and autonomy to data analysts.

Back to all tutorials

Databases

Warehouses and Lakes

How to load data from BigQuery to DuckDB

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your BigQuery data into DuckDB within minutes.

Try Airbyte Cloud free

Deploy Airbyte Open Source

Step 1: Setup BigQuery

Step 2: Setup DuckDB

Step 3: Setup a connection Use Cases Wrapping Up

Example H2

Example H3

Sync data between BigQuery and DuckDB

Get your data syncing in minutes

Try Airbyte free

TL;DR

set up BigQuery as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up DuckDB as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is BigQuery

What is DuckDB

Integrate BigQuery with DuckDB in minutes

Try for free now

Prerequisites

A BigQuery account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A DuckDB account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Step 1: Set up BigQuery as a source connector

1. First, you need to have a Google Cloud Platform account and a project with BigQuery enabled.

2. Go to the Google Cloud Console and create a new service account with the necessary permissions to access your BigQuery data.

3. Download the JSON key file for the service account and keep it safe.

4. Open Airbyte and go to the Sources page.

5. Click on the "Create a new source" button and select "BigQuery" from the list of available sources.

6. Enter a name for your source and click on "Next".

8. Click on "Test Connection" to make sure everything is working correctly.

9. If the test is successful, click on "Create Source" to save your configuration.

10. You can now use your BigQuery source connector to extract data from your dataset and load it into Airbyte for further processing.

Step 2: Set up DuckDB as a destination connector

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your BigQuery data to DuckDB

Once you've successfully connected BigQuery as a data source and DuckDB as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select BigQuery from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose DuckDB from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific BigQuery objects you want to import data from towards DuckDB. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from BigQuery to DuckDB according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your DuckDB data warehouse is always up-to-date with your BigQuery data.

Use Cases to transfer your BigQuery data to DuckDB

Integrating data from BigQuery to DuckDB provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

Advanced Analytics: DuckDB’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your BigQuery data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within BigQuery alone.
Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with BigQuery, syncing to DuckDB allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
Historical Data Analysis: BigQuery has limits on historical data. Syncing data to DuckDB allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
Data Security and Compliance: DuckDB provides robust data security features. Syncing BigQuery data to DuckDB ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
Scalability: DuckDB can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding BigQuery data.
Data Science and Machine Learning: By having BigQuery data in DuckDB, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
Reporting and Visualization: While BigQuery provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to DuckDB, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a BigQuery table that needs to be converted to a DuckDB table, Airbyte can do that automatically.