DuckDB support for fsspec filesystems allows querying data in filesystems that DuckDB's httpfs extension does not support. fsspec has a large number of inbuilt filesystems, and there are also many external implementations. This capability is only available in DuckDB's Python client because fsspec is a Python library, while the httpfs extension is available in many DuckDB clients.

Example

The following is an example of using fsspec to query a file in Google Cloud Storage (instead of using their s3 inter-compatibility api).

Firstly, you must install duckdb and fsspec, and a filesystem interface of your choice

$ pip install duckdb fsspec gcsfs

then you can register whichever filesystem you'd like to query

import duckdb
from fsspec import filesystem

# this line will throw an exception if the appropriate filesystem interface is not installed
duckdb.register_filesystem(filesystem('gcs'))

duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM read_csv_auto('gcs:///bucket/file.csv')")

These filesystems are not implemented in C++, hence, their performance may not be comparable to the ones provided by the httpfs extension. It is also worth noting that as they are third party libraries, they may contain bugs that are beyond our control.