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Access and work with a database instance

Preview

This feature is in Public Preview in the following regions: us-east-1, , us-east-2, us-west-21, eu-west-2, ap-southeast-1, ap-southeast-2, eu-central-1, ap-south-1.

This page outlines the different ways to work with your Lakebase database instance and recommends how to optimize PostgreSQL queries.

Ways to access your Database

Here are the following methods to access your database instance to run PostgreSQL queries and manage identities. As a managed Postgres service, there are some limitations in functionality. See Postgres compatibility.

Before connecting to your database using an external editor or Databricks notebooks, make sure you can authenticate to the database instance.

Method

Description

SQL editor

Connect to and query your database from the Databricks SQL editor.

Databricks notebooks

Connect to and query from your database from Databricks notebooks.

SQL clients

Connect to and query from your database from external tools such as psql, DBeaver, and pgAdmin.

If you query through a Databricks SQL endpoint, the query is federated to a database instance.

Run federated queries in Databricks SQL

Use federated queries via DBSQL to query your Postgres table without syncing your data.

Diagram of using federated queries to query a Postgres table

Key considerations:

  • Latency: Federated queries have higher latency than direct PostgreSQL queries.
  • Throughput: Databricks SQL supports lower queries per second (QPS) compared to querying PostgreSQL directly.
  • Query optimization: For best performance, write queries that filter on the primary key or an indexed column of the Postgres table.