Setup

You can download Cottontail DB releases from the releases page or build the distributions from the source. Distributions can be started by executing bin/cottontaildb (Unix) or bin/cottontaildb.bat (Windows).

Cottontail DB requires a path to a valid configuration file as a program argument, i.e., bin/cottontaildb /path/to/your/config.json Once Cottotail DB has started, you should see the following log message and the CLI prompt:

Cottontail DB server is up and running at port 1865 ! Hop along...
cottontaildb> 

To get a list of available CLI commands, type help. Currently, there is type-ahead for commands, schemas and entities.

Using Cottontail DB Docker Container

There are pre-built Docker containers for Cottontail DB for every release version. You can run it using the following command

docker run -it --name cottontaildb -p 1865:1865 -v /path/to/volume:/cottontaildb-data docker.pkg.github.com/vitrivr/cottontaildb/cottontaildb:<version>

It is important to expose the Cottontail DB port using -p 1865:1865 (adjust if you'reusing a different port) and to map the data directory from the host into the container using -v. The data directory is expected to contain a valid config.json file!

Please mind, that you need to login into GitHub in order to be able to download the Docker image. See official manual for further information.

Using Cottontail DB as Maven Dependency

You can also use Cottontail DB as Maven dependency, e.g., for use in embedded mode. Just include the following dependency descriptor:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.vitrivr</groupId>
  <artifactId>cottontaildb</artifactId>
  <version>0.12.0</version>
</dependency>

To start Cottontail DB in embedded mode, you can invoke CottontailKt.embedded() with a valid Config class instance.