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About data connectors

Each Tonic workspace has a source database, which contains the original data, and a destination database, where Tonic writes the data after it runs a data generation job and applies the table mode, generator, and subsetting configuration.
Tonic provides a set of available data connectors. Each connector is associated with a specific application database, data warehouse, or Spark product. When you create a workspace, you choose the connector to use based on how your source data is stored.
Each data connector can have specific configuration requirements. A data connector also might not support all of the Tonic features.
For an overview list of the available data connectors, see Data connector summary.

Types of data connectors

Data connectors fall into one of the following general categories. Tonic connects and writes to the data slightly differently for each type.

Application database

For an application database, Tonic connects to both the source and destination databases as an SQL client.
It reads data, transforms the data, and then writes the data directly to the destination database. The transformation occurs on the Tonic server.

Data warehouse

For a data warehouse, except for Google BigQuery, Tonic uses temporary file storage when it reads and processes the data. It then writes the data from the temporary storage to the destination database.

Spark

For Spark data connectors, Tonic uses a metastore or data catalog to get the file format. It then uses Spark to process the source files and write to the destination files.

File connector

The file connector allows you to use files as the source data. You add files to a file group, which contains files that have an identical format and structure. Each file group is treated as a table for the purposes of generator configuration.
For files that you add from your local file system, Tonic encrypts the files and then stores them in the large file store of the Tonic application database.
Tonic does not store files that you add from cloud storage.
When the generation is complete, Tonic writes transformed versions of the source files to an output location. The output files have the same name and structure as the input files. Previous versions of the generated files are replaced.

Availability requirements for data connectors

Whether a data connector is available to use is based on the following:
  • License plan
  • Deployment type (Tonic Cloud or self-hosted)

License plan requirements for data connectors

With a Basic license, then you can use one data connector, which must be either MySQL or PostgreSQL.
With a Professional license, you can use two data connectors, which can be any data connector other than Oracle.
With an Enterprise license, there are no limits on the number of data connectors, and you can use Oracle.

Tonic Cloud support for data connectors

Tonic Cloud does not support the following data connectors, regardless of the license plan:

Availability overview

The following table summarizes the data connector availability based on the license plan and deployment type:

General rules for data connectors

Same data connector for source and destination

The source and destination databases use the same connector. For example, you cannot take data from a MySQL source database and then have Tonic generate an Oracle destination database.

Same version for source and destination

The source and destination databases also should use the same database version. At the very least, the version used by the destination database cannot be older than the version used by the source database. For example, if the source database uses PostgreSQL 12.8, then the destination database cannot use a lower version such as PostgreSQL 12.4.

Allowlisting Tonic static IP addresses for Tonic Cloud

If you use Tonic Cloud, and your database only allows connections from allowlisted IP addresses, then you need to allowlist Tonic static IP addresses. This is not required for self-hosted instances of Tonic.
For the United States-based instance (app.tonic.ai), the static IP addresses are:
  • 54.92.217.68
  • 3.217.201.126
  • 52.22.13.250
For the Europe-based instance (app-de.tonic.ai), the static IP addresses are:
  • 18.159.127.160
  • 3.69.249.144