MotherDuck — Docs — Zero Human OS

This is an Express tool. Zero Human has already set up the server address, the permissions and the sign-in, so you connect it by pressing Connect and signing in with your own account. What Express is.

What a member can do

List databases, shares, tables, views and columns, and search the catalogue by name.
Run read-only SQL against MotherDuck databases.
Run SQL that changes data or schema, through a separate read-write tool.
Create, update and share Dives (interactive visualisations), and create, schedule and monitor Flights (scheduled Python jobs).
Ask questions answered from the DuckDB and MotherDuck documentation.

Each task names the MotherDuck tools it may call. motherduck on a task means every tool the MotherDuck server offers; a name such as motherduck.<tool> means that tool alone. A tool the task does not name is refused, whatever the connection allows.

Who connects it

A MotherDuck connection acts as the MotherDuck account that signed in when it was connected. It can do what that account can do, and no more.

Anyone who may change tools in your enterprise can connect MotherDuck for a member or a team. Connecting it for the whole enterprise is for the owner, and the people the owner allows.

A connection can sit on the enterprise, a team, a member, a role or a task, and the one further down replaces the one above: task, then role, then member, then team, then enterprise. A connection on anything but a task also reaches the chat of every member it covers.

What waits for you

In a run, nothing on MotherDuck waits for you unless the task declares a gate on it. To approve each change before it happens, gate the tools that change something on the task. See Gates and tool scopes.

In a chat, a MotherDuck tool that its server does not mark as read-only asks you before it runs, unless you chose Always allow for that member and tool.

Setup

Before you connect

Read-only query results are cut off at 2,048 rows and 50,000 characters, and a query that runs longer than 55 seconds is cancelled.

Connect it

MotherDuck is an Express tool, so there is no server address, key or app to set up. Work in one browser window throughout: the sign-in returns to the portal in the window you started from.

In the portal, open the member's page → Tools. To connect it for a team or the whole enterprise, open Tools in the sidebar.
Under Express, find MotherDuck and choose Connect. On the Tools page you are asked who uses it: one member, a team or the whole enterprise.
MotherDuck's sign-in opens. Sign in with the account the member should work as, and approve what it asks for.
You are back on Tools, and MotherDuck shows as connected.
Name the tools on the task, motherduck for all of them or each by name.
Check it. Run a task that reads something from MotherDuck. The run page shows the call and what came back.

You can take the access back at any time: delete the connection on Tools, or remove Zero Human OS from the connected apps in your MotherDuck account.

A first task to try

With MotherDuck connected, give a member a task that uses it. For example:

Each morning, run our daily metrics query and report any figure that moved more than 20 per cent from yesterday.

Start this task in the portal. It opens a conversation with your COO with the request written out. Read it, change what you like and send it. The COO asks what it still needs to know, then proposes the task for you to approve: its name, who owns it, its guardrails, the MotherDuck tools it may use and its instructions. Nothing is created until you approve it.