I’m interested in Observable for teams, but first want to understand more clearly how Observable interacts with private data. Thanks!

Good morning! Currently, Observable does not directly host private data. We host the code in your team notebooks, which can securely connect to private data sources over HTTPS with proper CORS headers, using Observable Secrets , or OAuth, or other preexisting web authentication, or even local files .…

OK, no thanks for the long reply. My team has all of our data in BigQuery, so would ideally like to be able to connect to BigQuery to read the data in a really simple way. It sounds like that might be something in the pipeline?

What if I need data to be nonpublic but my org doesn’t have an API? Does anybody have a trick for this? I could do a secret gist, but that’s probably not good enough for my org.

@shastabolicious — What format (or database) is your private data in currently? We’re getting ready to start beta testing a new feature that may help with your use case…

I’m afraid in that case you’re going to have to wait a bit longer for us to release a CSV upload feature — this upcoming one focuses on MySQL and Postgres databases to start… Some of your current options are: Paste the CSV contents into an Observable cell (only if the data is very small) Serve vi…

Glitch projects can be private, and even public glitch projects can contain private data that will never be shown or shared. A glitch-hosted server could either expose the data via a heavily restricted API, or in combination with ObservableHQ secrets require an access key (or both). Don’t be foole…

I’d be interested in seeing an example notebook on the google sheet option. Thanks, Evan

Hi Evan, I put together an example notebook — but the steps involved in getting a private Google OAuth connection set up are so complicated and unfriendly that it’s not going to be a method that we want to officially recommend to anyone. We’re going to work on a real Observable / Google Sheets con…

We’re definitely working on this type of feature (see my latest post in announcements). We currently only have support for PostgreSQL and MySQL, but BigQuery is on the list already.

How does private data hosting work for teams?

Help

shastabolicious June 13, 2019, 8:32pm 6

Plain old .csv’s

If Observable authenticates via GitHub, can I easily write to it?

Love the databases feature!

Topic		Replies	Views
Private data in csv format Help	5	580	October 21, 2022
Private Data Repos and Observable Help	6	450	September 30, 2022
read data from Google Cloud Storage public bucket Help	17	1143	February 1, 2025
Backend data stores? Feedback	2	1092	February 9, 2018
Is there a way to run Observable on my local server Help	7	7309	March 20, 2021

How does private data hosting work for teams?

Related topics