Load Amazon SQS data to DuckDB

Amazon SQS is a managed message queuing service that enables you to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Everything needed to build a working Amazon SQS → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your Amazon SQS to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from Amazon SQS to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the Amazon SQS API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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Amazon SQS API at a glance

These values come from the Amazon SQS API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Amazon SQS API?

Amazon SQS uses AWS Signature Version 4 (SigV4) for authentication, which requires signing requests using your AWS access keys. You must include an 'Authorization' header containing the SigV4 signature, along with 'X-Amz-Date' and optionally 'X-Amz-Security-Token' for temporary credentials.

1. Get your credentials

1. Log in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the IAM (Identity and Access Management) dashboard. 2. In the navigation pane, select Users. 3. Choose the target IAM user for whom you want to create credentials. 4. Click on the Security credentials tab. 5. Under the Access keys section, click Create access key. 6. Select the appropriate use case (e.g., Local code or Command Line Interface) and click Next. 7. Optionally add tags and then click Create access key. 8. Download the .csv file containing the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, as the secret key cannot be retrieved again after this step.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.amazon_sqs_source]
aws_access_key_id = "YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"
aws_secret_access_key = "YOUR_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"
aws_session_token = "YOUR_AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" # Optional: required only when using temporary credentials

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What Amazon SQS data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Amazon SQS endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Amazon SQS records?

Amazon SQS exposes NextToken on /, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "list_queues", "endpoint": {
    "path": "/",
    "data_selector": "QueueUrls",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "NextToken", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated Amazon SQS pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading ListQueues and ReceiveMessage from the Amazon SQS API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def amazon_sqs_source(aws_access_key_id_aws_secret_access_key_aws_session_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://sqs.<region>.amazonaws.com",
            "auth": {"type": "api_key", "api_key": aws_access_key_id_aws_secret_access_key_aws_session_token, "name": "Authorization", "location": "header"},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "list_queues", "endpoint": {"path": "/", "data_selector": "QueueUrls"}},
            {"name": "get_queue_attributes", "endpoint": {"path": "/", "data_selector": "Attributes"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_amazon_sqs_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="amazon_sqs_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="amazon_sqs_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(amazon_sqs_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_amazon_sqs_to_duckdb()

Run it with python amazon_sqs_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query Amazon SQS data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("amazon_sqs_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.list_queues.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM amazon_sqs_data.list_queues LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the Amazon SQS to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw Amazon SQS loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load Amazon SQS data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack