Create a StarRocks Data Source

Follow these steps to connect to StarRocks and create a StarRocks data source:

Configure User Access Rights
Create a StarRocks Data Source

Refer to Additional Information for additional performance tips and information about StarRocks feature support.

Configure User Access Rights

To ensure GoodData can successfully connect, discover metadata, and execute queries, you must grant permissions to the Catalog (data scope), Warehouse (compute scope), and Information Schema (metadata scope).

Run the following SQL commands as an ADMIN or ROOT user in your StarRocks cluster.

Set Context (Optional)
If you are provisioning access to an external catalog (e.g., Iceberg, Hudi) or a specific project catalog, switch to it first.
```
-- Switch to the target catalog (default is 'default_catalog')
SET CATALOG {catalog_name};
```
Create a Role
It is a best practice to manage permissions via roles rather than direct user grants.
```
CREATE ROLE {role_name};
```

Grant Compute & Catalog Access

GoodData requires “Usage” privileges to enter the catalog and utilize compute resources.

-- Allow the role to access the catalog (Data Container)
GRANT USAGE ON CATALOG {catalog_name} TO ROLE {role_name};

-- Allow the role to use a compute warehouse (Compute Resources)
-- Note: 'default_warehouse' is standard, but change if using dedicated warehouses
GRANT USAGE ON WAREHOUSE {warehouse_name} TO ROLE {role_name};

Grant Metadata Discovery Permissions

GoodData needs to read the information_schema to generate Logical Data Models (LDM). Without this, schema introspection will fail.

-- Grant access to system views for metadata discovery
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN DATABASE information_schema TO ROLE {role_name};
GRANT SELECT ON ALL VIEWS IN DATABASE information_schema TO ROLE {role_name};

Grant Data Access

Grant read access to the specific business data.

-- Option A: Grant access to the entire database
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN DATABASE {database_name} TO ROLE {role_name};
GRANT SELECT ON ALL VIEWS IN DATABASE {database_name} TO ROLE {role_name};

-- Option B: Grant access to specific tables only
-- GRANT SELECT ON TABLE {database_name}.{table_name} TO ROLE {role_name};

Create User

Create the specific user and assign the role. Setting catalog and database properties is highly recommended so the user session automatically lands in the correct context.

CREATE USER {user_name} IDENTIFIED BY '{strong_password}'
DEFAULT ROLE {role_name}
PROPERTIES (
    "catalog" = "{catalog_name}",
    "database" = "{database_name}"
);

Create a StarRocks Data Source

Once you have configured your StarRocks user’s access rights, you can proceed to create a StarRocks data source that you can then connect to.

Steps:

On the home page switch to Data sources.
Click Connect data.
Select StarRocks.
Name your data source and fill in your StarRocks credentials and click Connect:
Click Save.
Your data source is created!

Steps:

Create a StarRocks data source with the following API call:

curl $HOST_URL/api/v1/entities/dataSources \
-H "Content-Type: application/vnd.gooddata.api+json" \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.gooddata.api+json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_TOKEN" \
-X POST \
-d '{
    "data": {
    "type": "dataSource",
    "id": "<unique_id_for_the_data_source>",
    "attributes": {
    "name": "<data_source_display_name>",
    "url": "jdbc:mysql://<STARROCKS_HOST>:9030/<STARROCKS_DBNAME>?sslMode=<REQUIRED/VERIFY_IDENTITY>&permitMysqlScheme=true",
    "schema": "<STARROCKS_DBNAME>",
    "type": "STARROCKS",
    "username": "<STARROCKS_USER>",
    "password": "<STARROCKS_PASSWORD>"
}}}' | jq .

To confirm that the data source has been created, ensure the server returns the following response:

{
  "data": {
    "type": "dataSource",
    "id": "<unique_id_for_the_data_source>",
    "attributes": {
      "name": "<data_source_display_name>",
      "url": "jdbc:mysql://<STARROCKS_HOST>:9030/<STARROCKS_DBNAME>?sslMode=<REQUIRED/VERIFY_IDENTITY>&permitMysqlScheme=true",
      "schema": "<STARROCKS_DBNAME>",
      "type": "STARROCKS",
      "username": "<STARROCKS_USER>"
    }
  },
  "links": {
    "self": "$HOST_URL/api/v1/entities/dataSources/<unique_id_for_the_data_source>"
  }
}

Additional Information

Ensure you understand the following feature support, limitations, and recommended practices.

Analytical Function Support

StarRocks data sources support the following MAQL statistical and regression functions:

MEDIAN
PERCENTILE
CORREL
COVAR
RSQ
SLOPE
INTERCEPT

You can use these functions in metrics backed by a StarRocks data source.

AI Lake currently uses StarRocks as its analytical compute engine, so the same function support applies when querying data through an AI Lake data source.

Note

Use this article to configure a direct connection to a StarRocks database.

AI Lake data sources are provisioned through AI Lake and are not created manually with the StarRocks connection flow described on this page. For details, see the AI Lake documentation.

Unsupported Features and Limitations

GoodData does not currently support the following features:

Boolean Columns

Filtering directly by boolean columns is not supported.

If you need to filter by a boolean value, expose the value through a supported type in the source data or through a database view before creating the logical data model.

SQL Datasets

There are known issues when using SQL datasets with StarRocks:

Converting a regular dataset into a SQL dataset can generate an invalid query. Review and adjust the generated SQL before saving the SQL dataset.
SQL datasets are not supported if the query contains TINYINT, FLOAT, DECIMAL, or DOUBLE UNSIGNED.
When converting a dataset to a SQL dataset, the StarRocks YEAR data type is converted to STRING.

Multiple Hosts

StarRocks JDBC URLs with multiple hosts are not currently supported. Configure the data source with a single StarRocks host.

MySQL

MariaDB