Have you ever wondered how you could use a database server on Sherlock? Or wanted to run jobs that query data from a SQL database? Or even better, multiple jobs that would interact with the same database? Have you ever wanted to store datasets in a SQL format and be able to query them over long periods of time, from many different jobs?

Well, now you can.

Sherlock provides a installation of MariaDB, a free MySQL alternative, that you can run in the context of a job, and load with the following command:

$ ml system mariadb 

You can submit a job that starts a MariaDB instance, and query it from within that job. You can also start a DB-server job, and then interact with it from other jobs, over the network.

And if you store the database data on one of the shared, persistent Sherlock filesystems, you'll find your database data back the next time you submit a DB-server job and start a MariaDB instance, without having to re-import anything.

For more information about Sherlock's self-service database-in-a-box option , see the documentation at:
https://www.sherlock.stanford.edu/docs/software/using/mariadb/