Data and settings locations

Querybara keeps everything it saves in one data folder per user: the local store with your connections and settings, the SSH hosts you trusted, and a few supporting files. The CLI uses the same folder by default, so both see the same connections.

The data folder

System	Folder
Linux	~/.config/Querybara (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Querybara when it is set)
macOS	~/Library/Application Support/Querybara
Windows	%APPDATA%\Querybara

To keep the data somewhere else, for example a portable setup or a test, set QUERYBARA_USER_DATA_DIR to another folder before starting the app. The CLI follows the same variable.

What is in it

Path	What it holds
querybara.db	The local store, a SQLite database (see below)
known_hosts	SSH host keys you chose to trust and remember; shared with the CLI
ssh-keys/	PuTTY keys converted when you imported them, readable only by you
.updaterId	A random id used for staged rollouts of updates

The local store

querybara.db holds:

• connection profiles and their folders;
• saved secrets, sealed by the OS keychain (plaintext never reaches the file), including the passphrases of scheduled encrypted backups;
• query history, saved queries and snippets;
• the metadata cache that autocomplete reads;
• settings, including the job history (the last 50 jobs), saved wizard settings and your key bindings;
• saved structure and data comparisons;
• schedules and their run history, the newest 200 runs of each schedule;
• unapplied ER model changes, one draft per connection, database and schema, kept until you apply or discard them;
• saved table views: column layout, sort and filter;
• autosaved editor tabs, which come back after a crash. They hold the editor text, never results or secrets.

Secrets do not move with the file

Saved passwords are sealed with this computer’s keychain. If you copy querybara.db to another machine or user, the profiles come along but their saved passwords cannot be read there; Querybara asks for them instead.

Temporary files

A data compare writes its row differences to a querybara-sync- folder under the system’s temporary folder. The folder is removed when the comparison is discarded or pushed out by newer ones, and when Querybara quits.

A file that has to be read at any position but arrives as a stream, such as a Parquet file or an Excel workbook on the CLI’s stdin, or a gzip-compressed Parquet file, is first copied to a querybara-spool- folder under the temporary folder. The copy is removed when the read ends.

The CLI

querybara opens the same querybara.db by default. --store <path> or QUERYBARA_STORE points it at another store file, and its known_hosts file is the one next to the store it uses, unless you pass --known-hosts. See Installing and running.

Files you save

Some files live wherever you save them, not in the data folder: backups, exports, the files that scheduled runs write (into the folder each schedule names), and ER models saved as .model.json files. Deleting a schedule leaves the files its runs wrote.

Update policy files

Administrators can turn updates off machine-wide with a policy file outside the data folder: /Library/Application Support/Querybara/policy.json on macOS and /etc/querybara/policy.json on Linux. See Updates and channels.

Related

• Security model
• Updates and channels
• Global options and environment