Hey friends!

I had this thought given an actual real world problem at work.

Generally whenever you have some kind of front-facing app that consumes data from somewhere, usually an API of sorts, if you’re using data from your own company or somewhere else the data the API uses is stored in some kind of database somewhere.

The most basic example is:

Hosted database → something like an API that’ll get data from it → application

And that’s actually fine for a lot of cases. Obviously there’s stuff like caching and backing up your data that has to be thought of, but the general flow of data is pretty simple in a broad sense.

However there’s one thing I thought of to consider, especially in a case at work.

What if the API is only used to get data from a database? If you’re not actually updating or removing anything from the database, this is maybe where you might have a usecase for using an OLAP. It’s optimized for analyzing data as opposed to transacting with it.

There’s several solution, but the one I’m focused on is DuckDB or MotherDuck (it’s DuckDB under the hood).

If I wanted to use Ash with Motherduck, Ash to model the entities for manipulating for analysis or whatever with the API, could I create a custom Data layer that will connection to a running instance of DuckDB? Or would this get a little hairy?