Quickstart
From an empty tenant to a query returning rows.
One path from a brand new tenant to a SQL result: upload a CSV, query it, and read the rows. It takes about ten minutes, and you need nothing set up in advance.
Where your data is stored
Your tenant comes with Beetl's hosted store, an object store that Beetl registers for you when the tenant is created. It is the tenant's default store, so everything in this quickstart lands there without any configuration.
You can also bring your own S3-compatible bucket. See Use your own object storage at the end of this page.
Sign in
Go to app.beetl.io, press Sign In and log in with your Beetl account. You land on Home, the Data Landscape graph, which starts out empty.
Upload a file
On Home, open the File sets card, create a File Set, and drop in one CSV. Beetl accepts .csv,
.parquet, .jsonl and .ndjson files up to 5 GiB each. A set takes the format of its first
file.
A file processor appears on Home for the set and imports the file into a Bronze dataset on its own. Its name is what you will write in SQL, and the processor's Dataset link takes you to it. Deleting the set later keeps the dataset. See File Sets.
Check the dataset
The dataset shows up as a node on Home. Click it to open the details pane, which shows the schema, the storage location and the object store it was written to. The Data preview tab shows the first 30 rows.
Query it
Click Query in the sidebar and write SQL against the dataset name from step 2. Column autocompletion uses the real schema, so start typing a column name and Beetl offers the rest.
SELECT *
FROM your_dataset_name
LIMIT 100;Run it with the button in the editor footer or with Ctrl/Cmd+Enter. The editor uses the DataFusion engine with the PostgreSQL dialect, and you can cancel a long run from the same footer.
You now have rows.
Keep the result
Beetl saves every result with its own URL.
Switch to Chart to plot it, click a cell to see the column's role and the expression behind it, download it as CSV, or reopen it later from Recent results in the page header.
Results are kept for 7 days
After 7 days a result no longer opens. To keep a number longer, download the CSV, or turn the query into a pipeline that writes a dataset (next section). The full detail is on Query results.
Next: your first pipeline
A pipeline turns that query into something that runs repeatedly and writes a dataset. On Home, right-click the canvas and choose New pipeline. Add your Bronze dataset as a source, paste the SQL you just ran as the first stage, preview it, add a destination, then Save and Deploy.
The full tour is in Pipelines. If you hit an error code along the way, the Troubleshooting page covers the common ones.
Use your own object storage
Beetl's hosted store is enough to get started, but you can register any S3-compatible bucket as well, for example to keep data in your own account or region. Open the account menu, choose Settings, and on Object storage choose Add object store. Enter a name, the bucket's base URL and its credentials.
Beetl checks the bucket before it saves anything: it writes a test object, reads it back and deletes it. If that round trip fails, the store is not added. Adding, editing and removing stores requires the TenantAdmin role.
A tenant can have several stores, and one of them is the default that new datasets are written to. Once a bucket is registered, you can also bring in files that already sit in it without copying them: right-click the canvas on Home and choose Register data set. See Registered datasets.
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