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Create a TiDB Cloud Starter Instance

This document walks you through the quickest way to get started with TiDB. You will use TiDB Cloud to create a TiDB Cloud Starter instance, connect to it, and run a sample application on it.

If you need to run TiDB on your local machine, see Starting TiDB Locally.

Step 1. Create a TiDB Cloud Starter instance

  1. If you do not have a TiDB Cloud account, click here to sign up for an account.

  2. Log in to your TiDB Cloud account.

  3. On the My TiDB page, click Create Resource.

  4. On the Create Resource page, Starter is selected by default. Enter a name for your TiDB Cloud Starter instance, and then select the cloud provider and region where you want to create it.

  5. Click Create to create a TiDB Cloud Starter instance.

    Your TiDB Cloud Starter instance will be created in approximately 30 seconds.

  6. After your TiDB Cloud Starter instance is created, click your instance name to go to its overview page, and then click Connect in the upper-right corner. A connection dialog is displayed.

  7. In the dialog, select your preferred connection method and operating system to get the corresponding connection string. This document uses MySQL client as an example.

  8. Click Generate Password to generate a random password. The generated password will not show again, so save your password in a secure location. If you do not set a root password, you cannot connect to the TiDB Cloud Starter instance.

Step 2. Connect to a TiDB Cloud Starter instance

  1. If the MySQL client is not installed, select your operating system and follow the steps below to install it.

    For macOS, install Homebrew if you do not have it, and then run the following command to install the MySQL client:

    brew install mysql-client

    The output is as follows:

    mysql-client is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /opt/homebrew,
because it conflicts with mysql (which contains client libraries).

If you need to have mysql-client first in your PATH, run:
  echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

For compilers to find mysql-client you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client/include"

    To add the MySQL client to your PATH, locate the following command in the above output (if your output is inconsistent with the above output in the document, use the corresponding command in your output instead) and run it:

    echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

    Then, declare the global environment variable by the source command and verify that the MySQL client is installed successfully:

    source ~/.zshrc
mysql --version

    An example of the expected output:

    mysql  Ver 8.0.28 for macos12.0 on arm64 (Homebrew)

    For Linux, the following takes Ubuntu as an example:

    apt-get install mysql-client

    Then, verify that the MySQL client is installed successfully:

    mysql --version

    An example of the expected output:

    mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 5.5.68-MariaDB, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

    1. Run the connection string obtained in Step 1.

      mysql --connect-timeout 15 -u '<prefix>.root' -h <host> -P 4000 -D test --ssl-mode=VERIFY_IDENTITY --ssl-ca=/etc/ssl/cert.pem -p
    1. Fill in the password to sign in.

    Step 3. Execute a SQL statement

    Let's try to execute your first SQL statement on TiDB Cloud.

    SELECT 'Hello TiDB Cloud!';

    Expected output:

    +-------------------+
| Hello TiDB Cloud! |
+-------------------+
| Hello TiDB Cloud! |
+-------------------+

    If your actual output is similar to the expected output, congratulations, you have successfully executed a SQL statement on TiDB Cloud.

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