Try CrateDB Live
- 1. Choose Scenario
- 2. Get Ready
- 3. Run CrateDB
- 4. Import Data
- 5. Explore Queries
- 6. More Queries
- 7. Connect
- 8. Next Steps
Next steps: load your own data
You’ve done with the demo, and now want to use your own data. How do you go about this?
1. Find a dataset
If you are using the free cloud option you are going to be limited to 8GiB of data, so you may want to consider running it on your own hardware. For information on how to install CrateDB locally see here. We would recommend starting with a simple configuration and then iterating as you get a feel for CrateDB.
2. Decide what you want to do once you’ve loaded it.
CrateDB is good at loading data, but where it excels is running lots of queries against high volume datasets. We would suggest that you take our code and modify it to run against your schema, or write your own code from scratch. CrateDB is compatible with PostgreSQL, so you have many choices available.
3. Create a database schema
While CrateDB is compatible with PostgreSQL, there are some differences when it comes to DDL. If you haven’t already done so, you might want to read the docs on this before you start writing DDL statements.
4. Load the data
The simplest way to load data is the COPY FROM command, which loads a file into CrateDB. Any other Postgres compatible method should work. Bear in mind, that if you are using the free tier of CrateDB cloud, or a data source far away from your server, this will impact load speeds.
5. Query the data
Once you’ve loaded the data it will become visible to the CrateDB dashboard and other applications within a second or so. As we mentioned above, it makes sense to write an application to automatically query your data in CrateDB so you can see the full lifecycle of data being added and retrieved at work.
Optionally…
6. Build a dashboard
CrateDB works well with Grafana, as it looks like Postgres. Further information is here.
7. Connect an MCP server
CrateDB has its own MCP server. Getting it to work for a given data set is fairly simple - see this example.
8. Contact CrateDB
Once you’ve got your own data up and running with CrateDB, you’ll need to decide on your next steps. CrateDB’s solution engineers will happily help you chart a path forward. To book a call with them, click here.