Postgres clients

Important

Lakebase Autoscaling is in Beta in the following regions: eastus2, westeurope, westus.

Lakebase Autoscaling is the latest version of Lakebase with autoscaling compute, scale-to-zero, branching, and instant restore. For feature comparison with Lakebase Provisioned, see choosing between versions.

You can connect to your Lakebase project using any standard PostgreSQL client or tool. This includes command-line tools like psql and GUI applications like pgAdmin and DBeaver.

Authentication

For the best experience with third-party Postgres clients, we recommend using native Postgres password authentication. This method uses traditional Postgres roles with database passwords that don't expire hourly, making them well-suited for client tools and long-running sessions.

Important

OAuth tokens expire after one hour, requiring manual refresh for each session. For interactive tools like pgAdmin and DBeaver, this frequent refresh is impractical. Applications can implement token rotation to automatically refresh credentials.

Postgres passwords don't expire and work with all PostgreSQL-compatible tools.

Native Postgres passwords are widely supported across all Postgres tools and clients, and they're better suited for applications that cannot refresh credentials frequently. See Authentication overview for details about authentication methods.

To set up native Postgres password authentication, create a Postgres role with a password. See Manage Postgres roles for instructions.

Available clients

Choose the Postgres client that best fits your workflow:

Client	Description
psql	PostgreSQL's built-in command-line client for interactive database access.
pgAdmin	Graphical administration tool for managing databases and running queries.
DBeaver	Universal database management tool supporting multiple database types.
PgHero	Performance monitoring dashboard for identifying slow queries.

Connection details

All Postgres clients require the same basic Postgres database connection information, which you can obtain from the Lakebase App:

1. Navigate to the Lakebase App and select your project
2. Click Connect to open the database connection modal
3. Select the branch, compute, and database you want to connect to
4. Select a Postgres role (we recommend using a native Postgres role with password authentication)
5. Copy the connection details

The connection information includes:

• Host: Your compute endpoint hostname (e.g., ep-abc-123.databricks.com)
• Port: 5432 (default Postgres port)
• Database: Your database name (e.g., databricks_postgres)
• User: Your Postgres role name
• Password: Your Postgres role password

For more information about connection strings and authentication, see Connect to your project.