Using DBVisualizer to connect to a SQLFire cluster

There are many database development visual tools out there which more often then not allow you to connect to the many different RDBMS databases including Oracle, MySQL, etc.. In this post here we use DBVisualizer to connect to SQLFire and show how easy you can view/manipulate your distributed SQLFire database from a visual tool.

Note: It's assumed you already have DbVisualizer installed and running.

First thing we need to do is add SQLFire driver JAR file to the list of drivers DBVisualizer can use.

1. Select Tools -> Driver Manager
2. Click the + symbol to define a new driver and enter details as shown below.

Select the com.vmware.sqlfire.jdbc.Driver class

Note: sqlfireclient.jar can be found in $SQLFIRE_HOME/lib directory

In order to use the client driver, you must specify a JDBC connection URL for your SQLFire distributed system. The basic URL format for the client driver is: jdbc:sqlfire://hostname:port/
where hostname and port correspond to the -client-bind-address and -client-port value of a SQLFire server or locator in your distributed system.

3. Close the window when done
4. Right click on "Connections" icon and select "Create Database Connection".
5. If promoted elect "Use Wizard"
6. Enter a connection name in this demo I enter -> pas-sqlfire
7. Select the database driver we created at step #2 which should be "SQLFire 1.0"
8. Click next
9. Enter in connection details as shown below.

If authentication is disabled, then you can specify any temporary username and password value into these fields.

Note: SQLFire uses the username specified in the JDBC connection as the schema name when you do not provide the schema name for a database object. SQLFire uses "APP" as the default schema. If your system does not enable authentication, you can specify "APP" for both the username and password to maintain consistency with the default schema behavior. 

 

 10. Click finish

The following shows a query we run to view the distributed database SQLFire members.

For more information on SQLFire see the link below.

http://www.vmware.com/products/application-platform/vfabric-sqlfire/overview.html