Client Interfaces

Generally speaking, all the MonetDB programs are started from a command shell (such as bash or cmd.exe) or invoked from a script file. They do not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI)

However, as a user you may prefer to use more friendly GUI-programs. Many good GUI-programs are available. Those generic GUI-programs typically allow you to connect to any DBMS via standard database connectivity API such as ODBC or JDBC. MonetDB provides both an ODBC driver and a JDBC driver. The JDBC driver is usable for programs written in Java. There are also MonetDB server connectivity API libraries available for popular programming languages such as Python, PHP, Perl. (See more here).

If you need the MonetDB ODBC driver or JDBC driver, you will need to download, install and configure them at the computer OS where the GUI-program is installed or started. For the ODBC driver you will need system administrator privileges to install the MonetDB ODBC driver components. For the JDBC driver no sys-admin privileges are needed, you only have to download the single jar (Java ARchive) library file (i.e. monetdb-jdbc-3.1.jre8.jar) from the download area and configure in your GUI-program where the jar file is stored (or add it to the CLASSPATH environment setting or java -cp startup parameter). The MonetDB JDBC driver is a 100% pure Java (type 4) driver, which means the same JDBC driver can be deployed on all platforms which support the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.8 or higher.

  • Command line Interface

    The commonly used tool to directly interact with a MonetDB is called Mclient. It provides a powerful command line interface for interactive use and embedded in scripts.

  • JDBC-based command Line Interface

    This clients is modeled after Mclient, but build using a Java application with a JDBC connector.

  • Embedded MonetDB

    The MonetDB code base can also be embedded in a number of programming languages to benefit from a single-user, high-performance interface. See the description in the Developers Guide

  • Database Dump Utility

    To ensure the database is resilient against hardware and operating system failures, such as the famous OOM (Out-Of-Memory) signal, it is good practice to regularly perform a backup. For more details see Backup and Recovery