MonetDB can be accessed in several ways: using its command line client mclient, using a variety of more user-friendly third-party GUI applications and more in general from any application that supports one of several database connectivity API's such as ODBC, JDBC, pymonetdb, etc.
The specialized command line utility msqldump can be used to dump the contents of a MonetDB database to a file which can later be used to restore it or initialize a new instance.
Some of the tools and libraries, in particular mclient, msqldump and the
Java- and Python connectors, allow to bundle all connection parameters into a
URL. For example,
monetdb://localhost:50000/demo?user=monetdb&password=monetdb.
For more details, see MonetDB URLs.
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.
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
JDBC-based Command Line Interface
This client is modeled after mclient but implemented in Java using the 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