Software

This article provides an overview of the applications and interfaces in your Exasol system.

An Exasol 8 on-premises installation is deployed as an application in a Linux host operating system, which can be running on hardware or as cloud instances. Each node will contain the Exasol database engine, the cluster operating system (COS), the storage engine (EXAStorage), and the Exasol Deployment Tool (c4).

Exasol cluster operating system (COS) manages and monitors the nodes in the cluster. COS also manages communication between the nodes over the private (internal) network, and between the database and the database users and administrators over the public (external) network.

EXAStorage is a distributed storage engine that manages the data storage and the failover mechanisms in an Exasol deployment. Data is stored in data volumes, which can be located on either local or remote storage devices. Database backups are stored on separate backup volumes, which can be created either in the cluster or on remote storage. For information about how to create and manage volumes, see Storage Management.

Exasol Deployment Tool (c4) is a multi-purpose command line tool that is used to create, configure, and manage Exasol 8 deployments on all supported platforms. You can also use c4 to access other administration interfaces in Exasol. For more information, see Administration Tools.

Since Exasol does not include an operating system for the Linux host, you must prepare the machine according to the system requirements for your installation platform before you can deploy Exasol. For details about the system requirements and the installation procedure, see Installation.

Connect to Exasol

Once your Exasol database is up and running, you can connect to it using various compatible database clients and other tools. Setting up a connection requires that you have installed the necessary drivers and configured your network to allow traffic between the tool and Exasol, and that you have the connection details that are needed to configure the connection in the tool.

For information about how to download and install drivers and how to connect to an Exasol database using some common tools, see Connect to Exasol.