Prerequisites

To use a SynSQL cluster you need:

• An account. An administrator creates it (create user) and gives it privileges on the tables (grant). An account belongs to a group: users for ordinary accounts, admin for administrators. Ask your administrator for your user name and password (31 characters at most, no blank).
• The address of a SQL broker. Clients read it in a configuration file, etc/synsql.conf in your home directory. Each broker is one line:

SQL_BROKER  dev-sql-broker-1  8888  /home/synsql/backup
SQL_BROKER  dev-sql-broker-2  8888  /home/synsql/backup

The name must be resolvable from your machine, the port reachable (8888 by default). The client tries the brokers in the order of the file. Once connected, it learns the other brokers of the cluster from the one it reached.

• A client. The command line program synsql (see Tools), the C library, or the Python library (see API).
• Network access to the SQL brokers only. Your machine never needs to reach the master brokers or the data brokers.

On Windows, the Python client reads %APPDATA%\synsql\synsql.conf if etc/synsql.conf does not exist in your user profile. The variable SYNSQL_CONF can name the file explicitly.