IBM DB Query Client

This database query interface is available as an HTTP client, within the your deployment and can be accessed using the following URL: https://<ip>:<port>/smcfs/yfshttpdbi/sterlingdbqueryclient.jsp

This helps System Implementers (SI), Administrators and IBM Support personnel to query the remote database easily and securely on an on-demand basis to examine the actual data to assist their analysis. Users don’t need to setup database browsing tools such as DB Visualizer, SQL Squirrel, and so on and are free from going through the tedious process of creating and maintaining users on the remote DB server and establishing connection between these third-party tools and the cloud network.

The security aspects of granting the right access, ensuring no alteration of content and so on are at the disposal of the administrators. It is recommended to restrict the access for DB Query Client and control the queries invoked here, as retrieving a huge amount of data might impact the application server and performance of the environment. Read the Browsing the database documentation on how to grant access and permission to users.

You can enter your login credentials, input a valid SELECT or DESCRIBE SQL statement to match the requirement and get the relevant data from the cloud database. The results are displayed in simple HTML table format and you can also export the results to a CSV file for analysis. In this client, you deal with the database tables and columns directly and hence all possible SQL grammar can be applied to query the database and fetch the results. This makes it an effective tool to query anything in the database, which is not feasible with the API approach.

Just like APIs, the DB Query Client requests are also processed synchronously in the application server JVM and responses are sent back to the browser. So, querying a high-volume table either without any clause or with a clause that matches large number of records can choke the network traffic and sometimes even crash the application server. To prevent this situation, the number of records that can be fetched at a time from the DB Query Client is set to 10000 and Pagination is enabled by default. You can also specify the Number of Rows preferred at a time. This means you can set a maximum of 10000 rows and can traverse to the next set of records by clicking ‘Next’ on the query results screen and continue clicking ‘Next’ until there is no more data to display. The ‘Previous’ button is also enabled for the subsequent screens so that you can go back to the previous set of results from any screen.

Though the DB Query Client can retrieve 10000 records at a time, a higher value for Number of Rows might execute the queries slowly. If the results have a large number of rows per page, having tables with many columns and columns that have large data, you might have a sluggish browsing experience. But you can eventually view all the records. Therefore, it is advisable to enter specific SQL queries which typically return lesser number of results and a faster response.

Note: The slower queries would likely be slow in any other third-party database browsing tools as well.

For more information, see Running SQL queries with the DB Query Client.

In the non-paginated mode, a query is run as entered. This enables you to input any complex SQLs and get the top 10000 matching records. If you are running these queries for troubleshooting purposes or aim to find the incorrectly populated records, you will have some rectification after identifying those records. Therefore, once you make it right and run the same query again, it can fetch the next set of 10000 incorrect records. In this way, even if DB Query Client fetches only 10000 records at a time, you can fix all the records in an iterative manner.