Generally speaking, all the MonetDB programs are started from a command shell (such as bash or cmd.exe) or invoked from a script file. They do not have a Graphical User Interface (GUI)
However, as a user you may prefer to use more friendly GUI-programs. Many good GUI-programs are available. Those generic GUI-programs typically allow you to connect to any DBMS via standard database connectivity API such as ODBC or JDBC. MonetDB provides both an ODBC driver and a JDBC driver. The JDBC driver is usable for programs written in Java. There are also MonetDB server connectivity API libraries available for popular programming languages such as Python, PHP, Perl. (See more here).
If you need the MonetDB ODBC driver or JDBC driver, you will need to
download, install and configure them at the computer OS where the
GUI-program is installed or started. For the ODBC driver you will need
system administrator privileges to install the MonetDB ODBC driver
components. For the JDBC driver no sys-admin privileges are needed, you
only have to download the single jar (Java ARchive) library file (i.e.
monetdb-jdbc-3.1.jre8.jar) from the download
area and configure in your
GUI-program where the jar file is stored (or add it to the CLASSPATH
environment setting or java -cp startup parameter). The MonetDB JDBC
driver is a 100% pure Java (type 4) driver, which means the same JDBC
driver can be deployed on all platforms which support the Java Runtime
Environment (JRE) version 1.8 or higher.
The commonly used tool to directly interact with a MonetDB is called Mclient. It provides a powerful command line interface for interactive use and embedded in scripts.
JDBC-based command Line Interface
This clients is modeled after Mclient, but build using a Java application with a JDBC connector.
The MonetDB code base can also be embedded in a number of programming languages to benefit from a single-user, high-performance interface. See the description in the Developers Guide
To ensure the database is resilient against hardware and operating system failures, such as the famous OOM (Out-Of-Memory) signal, it is good practice to regularly perform a backup. For more details see Backup and Recovery