This section describes the BucketFS file system in Exasol.
What is BucketFS?
BucketFS is a synchronous file system that is available on all database nodes in an Exasol cluster. Each node in the cluster can connect to the BucketFS service and will see the same content as the other nodes.
A BucketFS service contains a number of buckets that can store a number of files. Each bucket can have different access privileges. Folders are not supported directly, but if you specify an upload path including folders, these will be created.
Each configured data disk in Exasol has a preinstalled BucketFS service with a default bucket. You can create additional BucketFS services as needed.
In on-premises installations of Exasol 2025.1 and later, you can access BucketFS from Exasol Admin. In earlier versions of Exasol we recommend that you use BucketFS Client to manage files.
To learn how to use BucketFS, see BucketFS (On-premises) or BucketFS (AWS).
Usage notes
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The default BucketFS service has a default bucket with the Java, Python and R script languages preinstalled. We recommend that you do not store large amounts of user data in this bucket, but instead create a separate BucketFS service on a separate partition for this purpose.
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The data in BucketFS is replicated locally on every server and automatically synchronized. To avoid performance issues we recommend that you do not store very large amounts of data in BucketFS.
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Writing data to BucketFS is an atomic operation. There is no lock on files, so the latest write operation will overwrite the file. In contrast to the database itself, BucketFS is a pure file-based system and has no transactional semantic.
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The data in BucketFS is not part of the database backups and must be manually backed up.
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The default BucketFS service has HTTP deactivated and HTTPS activated on port 2581 by default. To change the ports in the BucketFS service, use the ConfD job bucketfs_modify.
BucketFS Client
In on-premises installations of Exasol 2025.1 and later, you can manage files in BucketFS using Exasol Admin. In earlier versions of Exasol we recommend that you use BucketFS Client to manage files.
BucketFS Client (BFSC) is a command line tool that allows you to view the buckets in BucketFS and to list, upload, download, and delete files inside each bucket. BFSC is written in Java and can run on Windows and Linux. You can download BFSC from GitHub. To learn more, see BucketFS Client User Guide.
