Avoid requiring secret to query publicly accessible sheets (?)

[carlopi]

Unsure if viable, but it would be cool to cut another potential step, like ideally:

LOAD gsheets;
FROM read_gsheet(
      '1B4RFuOnZ4ITZ-nR9givZ7vWVOTVddC3VTKuSqgifiyE',
      sheet = 'We <3 Ducks',
      range = 'A:A',
      all_varchar = true
      );
--- Invalid Input Error:
--- No 'gsheet' secret found. Please create a secret with 'CREATE SECRET' first.

while this could possibly just work without auth.

Use case is that reading publicly available sheets could just work (while writing / accessing private ones will not)

Example is from the super cool article at https://duckdb.org/2025/02/26/google-sheets-community-extension

[zhongzachary]

I think Google requires logging in to access to their APIs. The extension is basically calling this API provided by Google: https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/reference/rest/v4/spreadsheets.values/get, and access token is required.

(Google also used the access token to limit the number of requests an user can make in a given time frame)

[archiewood]

@carlopi this is a cool idea, and one I have thought about before

@zhongzachary is right, irrespective of whether the sheet is private or not, if you use the google API, then you have to get an access token.

However, for public sheets, you can use an alternative method to get data, as explained by in this article: https://motherduck.com/blog/google-sheets-motherduck/

effectively you GET this URL
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{sheet_id}/export?format=csv

I believe it is much more limited in terms of functionality than the API, for example

• does not support streaming
• cannot choose range

So I could imagine adding this at some point, perhaps using an alternative function read_public_gsheet() or alike