User guide

This guide follows a normal working day with BroadSQL at the prompt: you connect to a database, find your way around it, query it efficiently, and keep track of what you did. Each step has one page.

If BroadSQL is not installed or configured yet, start with Getting started. What each published release contains is in its release notes; What's new ? lists the changes made since the latest one.

1. Connect to the right database

Every session starts with a connection. BroadSQL knows each physical database as a Connection, gathers the Connections of one application into a Database Group, and labels each with an Environment such as QA or PROD. Once you know these three ideas, CONNECT opens a database by name and ENV PROD moves to the production database of the same application.

Read Connections, Database Groups and Environments.

2. Find your way around a database

Connected to a database you do not know well, the first questions are what tables it has, what their columns mean and how they relate. BroadSQL answers them the same way on every database type, without querying vendor catalog tables.

Read Exploring a database.

3. Work efficiently at the prompt

Most time is spent typing and reading: history and search, TAB completion of tables and columns, re-running the last query with /, cancelling with Ctrl+C, and tables that fit the window. A few minutes here save hours later.

Read Interactive console & shortcuts.

4. Stop retyping lists of values

A list of IDs in a file, a spreadsheet column, the clipboard or the result you just looked at can go straight into a query's IN (...), and a query can be run again on another Environment in one line.

Read Patterns & List Sources.

5. Keep a record of what you did

BroadSQL can keep a dated, per-connection text file of every command and its output: useful to review an investigation, to show a colleague what happened, or to find the exact error a Script printed.

Read Command activity log.

6. Check a term, and what BroadSQL does with AI

The Glossary defines the BroadSQL terms in one line each. AI and BroadSQL states what BroadSQL does, and does not do, with AI.

Going further

Some tasks have their own section:

• Scripting: save a sequence of statements as a Script, with variables, named arguments and error control, and run it again by name. Start with the Scripting overview.
• Import / Export: send results to CSV, Excel, JSON, Markdown or a local H2 database, and load CSV files into a table. Start with Import / Export.
• API Client: call the HTTP API in front of your database from the same prompt (experimental). Start with the Universal API Client.

Every command, with its exact syntax, is in the command reference.