How to Connect Acquia Cloud Next to JDBC Database Tools

If you’re an Acquia customer or agency running projects on Acquia, you may have noticed that it has upgraded Acquia Cloud environments to Acquia Cloud Next over the last year. Acquia Cloud Next is an enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native Drupal hosting platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that integrates AWS services such as Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic File Service (EFS), and AWS Aurora Database Services.

The switchover is pretty seamless, and you might not see a change in your day-to-day workflow or performance from your Acquia Cloud Next instance. However one change you may spot is that you can no longer connect to Acquia Cloud databases with JDBC driver–based database tools like MySQL Workbench, DBeaver, JetBrains DataGrip, or JetBrains IDE. 

The Acquia Cloud Next documentation notes that you can no longer connect with these tools and suggests that you use Sequel Pro instead. The Sequel Pro application is only available for MacOS and is a much less robust tool for developer needs. Sequel Pro does not use JDBC at all to make connections which is why it’s unaffected by the database changes to Acquia Cloud Next. Since we have a mix of developers on Windows, Mac, and Linux, using Sequel Pro is not a full solution for us at Velir. So, it was critical for us to find one.

We do a lot of custom Drupal development, integrations, and Drupal migrations. And occasionally we may need to connect to a database in any of the server environments for analysis, debugging, or to perform maintenance you can only do from a SQL client. Having direct access is critical for that reason, so we were shocked that we could lose a valuable development and debugging method with Acquia’s recent changes. Fortunately, we discovered that you can connect with these tools. Here’s how!

The reason you can’t connect to Acquia Cloud Next instances like before is due to compatibility issues of default JDBC driver settings of MariaDB/MySQL that don’t work for AWS Aurora (what Acquia databases changed to). You can still make connections the way you could before using the credentials supplied on your Acquia Cloud database management page, but you must change two settings in the driver you’re using to make those connections.

The list of possible parameters available and their descriptions are listed here. It’s a long and technical list but there are two settings that aren’t compatible with AWS Aurora: useBatchMultisend and usePipelineAuth. When making a connection, you can see in the driver settings that their default value is “true”. That’s why the connections fail. They must be set to “false”, which is easy to change.

Before you make any adjustment to your connection settings you can see that the connection fails (pictured: JetBrains PHPStorm). By clicking into each setting in the “Advanced” tab you can set useBatchMultisend and usePipelineAuth to “false” and retry your connection. This time, you can see that your connection is successful:

Now that your connection is successful, you have access to the database again in Acquia Cloud Next and can keep rolling right along querying data and inspecting tables:

That’s it! Now you can continue to use the database tool(s) that you love. This works for any tool using JDBC drivers and the change is universal. Here is the same solution working in DBeaver:

These database tools that you can use in Drupal development are compatible with Windows, MacOS, and various Linux distributions. We highly recommend them for your teams:

• DBeaver
• JetBrains PHPStorm (see the documentation on the database tool)
• DataGrip

Need help making the most of Acquia’s robust features for your Drupal website? Reach out to us.