Introduction
Exasol is an analytics database management software, this is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system.
It supports SQL Standard 2003 and can be integrated via standard interfaces like ODBC, JDBC or ADO.NET.
Creating Exasol Docker instance
Exasol docker instance can be created with the help of GitHub page. This requires docker tool installed on the system.
host-machine:~$ sudo docker run –name exasoldb -p 8899:8888 –detach –privileged –stop-timeout 120 -v exa_volume:/exa exasol/docker-db
The command above will create exasoldb container. It will expose exasol container port 8888 on the host machine at port 8899. It means exasol database would be available at connection string host-system:8899.
It will also configure exasol database in persistent mode. i.e., the objects created will remain stored in the system,
Starting the exasol instance
The command in the last paragraph will create a exasol instance in a docker container. we can retrieve the container id using below command.
host-machine:~$ sudo docker container ls -a
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
d4f553b20771 exasol/docker-db “/usr/opt/EXASuite-6…” 6 days ago Up 53 minutes 0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8899->8888/tcp exasoldb
d4f553b20771 is the container id. This is a reference to the container which is running the exasol. Use this id to start the container as given below.
host-machine:~$ sudo docker container start d4f553b20771
Stopping the exasol database gracefully
Exasol database is a system which needs to be stopped carefully. If the host-system is shutdown with stopping the database. The tables created may be lost or system may not start again.
host-machine:~$ docker exec -ti exasoldb dwad_client stop-wait DB1
The command above will stop the database container. The host-machine can be shutdown or reboot.
Connecting using sql client.
A JDBC driver can be downloaded from exasol official download. I used Dbeaver to connect. Default user name is : sys and password is exasol.
Note – Docker image is not officially supported by exasol, but still can be used for simple use-cases.
Thoughts on Technology 