Load Brave ads data to DuckDB

The Brave Ads API enables advertisers to manage and report on advertising campaigns across the Brave ecosystem. Everything needed to build a working Brave ads → 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 Brave ads 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 Brave ads 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 Brave ads 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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Brave ads API at a glance

These values come from the Brave ads API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Brave ads API?

Authentication is handled by passing an API key in the request header. The required header name is X-Api-Key.

1. Get your credentials

1. Log in to the Brave Ads advertiser dashboard at https://ads.brave.com. 2. Navigate to your Profile or the API section. 3. Select the option to Generate API Key. 4. Record the generated key immediately, as it cannot be retrieved again after the session.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.brave_ads_source]
api_key = "your_api_key_here"

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 Brave ads data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Brave ads endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Brave ads records?

The Brave ads API reference does not document a timestamp or sequence field for these endpoints, so there is nothing to advertise here as verified. Pick a field from the endpoints table above that increases with every write, then set it as the cursor_path.

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{"name": "campaigns", "endpoint": {
    "path": "v1/api/campaigns",
    # Replace with a field that increases on every write.
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "REPLACE_ME", "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 Brave ads pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading campaigns and reporting from the Brave ads API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def brave_ads_source(api_key=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://ads-serve.brave.com",
            "auth": {"type": "api_key", "api_key": api_key, "name": "X-Brave-Api-Key", "location": "header"},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "campaigns", "endpoint": {"path": "v1/api/campaigns"}},
            {"name": "cards", "endpoint": {"path": "v1/cards"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_brave_ads_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="brave_ads_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="brave_ads_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(brave_ads_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_brave_ads_to_duckdb()

Run it with python brave_ads_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 Brave ads 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("brave_ads_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.campaigns.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM brave_ads_data.campaigns LIMIT 10;

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

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How do I deploy the Brave ads 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 Brave ads 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 Brave ads 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