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Build a TiDB Cluster in TiDB Cloud (Serverless Tier)

This document walks you through the quickest way to get started with TiDB. You will use TiDB Cloud to create a Serverless Tier cluster, 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 Serverless Tier cluster

  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 Clusters page, click Create Cluster.

  4. On the Create Cluster page, Serverless Tier is selected by default. Update the default cluster name if necessary, and then select the region where you want to create your cluster.

    Your TiDB Cloud cluster will be created in approximately 30 seconds.

  5. After your TiDB Cloud cluster is created, click Security Settings. In the Security Settings dialog box, set a root password to connect to your cluster, and then click Submit. If you do not set a root password, you cannot connect to the cluster.

  6. Click Connect. A connection dialog box is displayed. Under Connect with a SQL Client in the dialog, click the tab of your preferred connection method, and then save the corresponding connection string. The following section uses MySQL client as an example.

Step 2. Connect to a cluster

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

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 CentOS 7 as an example:

yum install mysql

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 execute a SQL statement on TiDB Cloud.

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