Pickleball spielen

One nice and easy way to make yourself familiar with Exasol – the leading In-Memory Analytic Database – is the Community Edition. It’s free and can be downloaded here as a virtual machine running on VirtualBox.

A good description how to install the Community Edition can be found here.

There’s an Exasol SQL Client called EXAplus. You can use it as GUI, then it looks like this:

A command line version of EXAplus is also available. I will use it for my articles subsequently because it works better than pictures from the GUI for that purpose. You will be able to copy & paste commands from the article that way, for example. If you install the Community Edition on a Windows host like I did, you get to the command line EXAplus this way: Open a cmd shell. Then

C:\>cd \Program Files (x86)\EXASOL\EXASolution-6.0\EXAplus

C:\Program Files (x86)\EXASOL\EXASolution-6.0\EXAplus>exaplusx64 -help

That gives you a basic help for the EXAplus CLI. I connect now as superuser to my Community Edition:

C:\Program Files (x86)\EXASOL\EXASolution-6.0\EXAplus>exaplusx64 -c 192.168.56.101:8563 -u sys -p exasol -lang EN
EXAplus 6.0.8 (c) EXASOL AG

Tuesday, May 15, 2018 2:13:50 PM CEST
Connected to database EXAone as user sys.
EXASolution 6.0.8 (c) EXASOL AG

SQL_EXA>

For those of you who are used to SQL*Plus, EXAplus will appear quite familiar:

SQL_EXA> col column_name for a40;
COLUMN   column_name ON
FORMAT   a40
SQL_EXA> desc exa_user_users;
EXA: desc exa_user_users;

COLUMN_NAME                              SQL_TYPE                                 NULLABLE DISTRIBUTION_KEY
---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- -------- ----------------
USER_NAME                                VARCHAR(128) UTF8
CREATED                                  TIMESTAMP
USER_PRIORITY                            VARCHAR(128) UTF8
USER_COMMENT                             VARCHAR(2000) UTF8

4 rows in resultset.

SQL_EXA> @c:/blogpostings/whoami;
EXA: select user_name from exa_user_users;

USER_NAME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SYS

1 row in resultset.

I placed a file named whoami.sql in c:/blogpostings containing the SELECT command. Notice the mandatory ; at the end of each command.

Oh, and CURSOR UP and DOWN scrolls you through the history of commands out of the box 🙂