Question 1

Does this pairing move data across clouds?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it is worth understanding before you scale it up. There is no direct path from Cloud Storage into MotherDuck. Polytomic reads your objects using the Google credentials on the connection, re-encodes the records as Parquet, uploads them to the S3 staging location MotherDuck loads from, and MotherDuck reads them there. So data leaves Google and lands in AWS on the way through, which means cross cloud and cross region egress can apply depending on where everything sits.

Question 2

Do I need AWS credentials as well as Google ones?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The two sides authenticate independently: a Google service account key reads your Cloud Storage bucket, and separate AWS credentials give MotherDuck access to the staging bucket. There is no credential handoff between them, and no way to have MotherDuck read Cloud Storage directly. Plan on provisioning both when you set this pairing up rather than expecting the Google credentials to cover everything.

Question 3

Which file formats work in each direction?

Accepted Answer

Reading from Cloud Storage: CSV, JSON arrays, JSON lines, and Parquet, with gzip, bzip2, and zstd decompressed automatically for the text formats. Writing back from MotherDuck: CSV, JSON Lines, JSON arrays, and Parquet. Replicate mode maintains one stable object replaced each run; snapshot mode writes a timestamped object per run. Externally compressed Parquet is not supported in either direction, since Parquet needs to seek within the file.

Question 4

How do I load many objects as one table?

Accepted Answer

Use an expression pattern rather than the older glob style, since only expression patterns treat a double asterisk as recursive. A pattern can gather many objects into a single table, descend through nested prefixes, and capture parts of the path into columns, which is how a layout organized by year and month arrives in MotherDuck as real date columns instead of information lost on load.

Connect MotherDuck with Google Cloud Storage

Connect MotherDuck and Google Cloud Storage with Polytomic

Crosses clouds by design

Credentials stay separate

Path patterns become columns

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Connect MotherDuck in Polytomic

Connect Google Cloud Storage in Polytomic

Create a sync between MotherDuck and Google Cloud Storage

Map fields and enable the sync

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