Reader URI: duckdb:///abs/path drops leading slash and falls through to a relative path

[shntnu]

Summary

--reader 'duckdb:///abs/path/to/file.duckdb' does not open the absolute path. The / after duckdb:// is consumed, so the connection string is interpreted as a relative path. The standard SQLAlchemy-style URI form (scheme:///abs/path) is the natural thing for a user to try, and there is no documented or working URI form that opens an absolute path.

Environment

• ggsql 0.2.7 (binary extracted from ggsql_0.2.7_aarch64.pkg)
• macOS 14.x, arm64

Reproducible example

$ cd "$HOME"   # cwd that does not contain a tmp/ child

$ ggsql run query.sql --reader 'duckdb:///tmp/somefile.duckdb'
Failed to create reader: Data source error: Failed to open DuckDB file 'tmp/somefile.duckdb': IO Error: Cannot open file "tmp/somefile.duckdb": No such file or directory

The path opened is tmp/somefile.duckdb (relative), not /tmp/somefile.duckdb (absolute).

Variations tested

Connection string	Behavior
duckdb:///tmp/foo.duckdb	Opens relative tmp/foo.duckdb (leading / dropped)
duckdb:////tmp/foo.duckdb	Same — both leading slashes dropped
duckdb:/tmp/foo.duckdb	Unsupported connection string
duckdb:tmp/foo.duckdb	Unsupported connection string
duckdb://./tmp/foo.duckdb	Opens relative ./tmp/foo.duckdb
duckdb://localhost/tmp/foo.duckdb	Authority not stripped — opens localhost/tmp/foo.duckdb
file:///tmp/foo.duckdb	Unsupported connection string
/tmp/foo.duckdb (no scheme)	Unsupported connection string

Suggested behavior

One of:

1. duckdb:///abs/path opens the absolute path (SQLAlchemy convention), or
2. The connection-string parser rejects the form with a message that points at a working alternative (e.g. "use duckdb://relative/path for relative or duckdb:///abs/path for absolute, but not these other forms").

The current behavior of silently accepting the form and routing it to a relative path is the surprising part — there is no error from the URI parser itself, only from DuckDB downstream when the resolved relative path doesn't exist.

Workaround

cd into a parent directory of the target file and pass a relative path:

cd /tmp && ggsql run query.sql --reader 'duckdb://somefile.duckdb'

Edge case worth knowing about

DuckDB's default open mode is create-if-missing. If the resolved relative path happens to land in a writable existing directory, DuckDB will silently create an empty .duckdb file there and the user gets a downstream "Table not found" catalog error rather than a path-resolution error. This requires the unfortunate combination of (a) the URI bug above, (b) DuckDB's default create-on-missing, and (c) a writable directory matching the resolved relative path on the user's machine. Worth mentioning because the failure mode is quietly destructive (a stray empty .duckdb appears) but the URI parsing fix above would prevent it.

[georgestagg]

Thanks for reporting this!

I made some changes to your PR to simplify the changes a little, but absolute paths should now work as expected.