Connect Xata to Excel, Sheets and AI

The Database field is a route, not a name

On every other Postgres connector the Database field holds an identifier, and Query Streams lower-cases it on the way through because that is what Postgres does with an unquoted name. On Xata that would be actively wrong, so it is the one place the rule is switched off.

• The value is a database:branch pair — mydb:main — which Xata resolves as a route. It is not a Postgres identifier and it does not follow identifier folding rules.
• A branch called Feature-X keeps its capital F and its capital X. Lower-cased to feature-x it stops resolving, which is why Xata is the only connector exempted from the normalisation.
• Leave the colon out and the connection still works — it lands on the default branch. The card points this out rather than letting it pass silently, because landing on main when you meant a feature branch produces correct-looking numbers from the wrong data.
• Nothing else about the name is checked. Query Streams passes the route through as you typed it and lets Xata decide whether it resolves.

What the agent does with a Xata host

Two behaviours are keyed to the .sql.xata.sh suffix, and neither is yours to configure.

• TLS is required, not requested. Any .sql.xata.sh host is connected to with encryption on regardless of the Use SSL box, so a string that lost its sslmode in the clipboard still travels encrypted.
• The connection is encrypted but the certificate chain is not verified. That is the honest description of it, and it is the same on every hosted provider Query Streams recognises.
• There is no pooler in the path. Some serverless Postgres services put a transaction-mode pooler in front and need prepared statements pinned off to cope; Xata does not, so the agent connects directly and skips all of that.
• The connection is saved as PostgreSQL with Xata kept as the badge. There is no connection type called Xata — which also means a plain Postgres connection you made earlier to the same host will pick up the Xata branding on sight.

Paste it rather than retyping it

Four credentials, two of which are easy to confuse and one of which is long enough to mistype. The card is built around pasting the string and catching the rest.

• The postgresql:// URI from the console is the expected form. The libpq host= keyword form parses too.
• Anything that is not a Postgres connection string is rejected with a message telling you where the right one lives, rather than being half-parsed into the wrong fields.
• An API key with leading or trailing whitespace is flagged. It is a clipboard artifact and it fails as an ordinary authentication error, which sends people looking for the wrong problem.
• Workspace ID goes in the username field and the API key goes in the password field. The card labels them that way rather than saying Username and Password and leaving you to guess.

-- Ordinary Postgres, read-only, against whichever branch you pointed at
SELECT   c.name,
         COUNT(o.id)   AS orders,
         SUM(o.amount) AS revenue
FROM     public.customers AS c
JOIN     public.orders    AS o ON o.customer_id = c.id
WHERE    o.placed_at >= now() - interval '30 days'
GROUP BY c.name
ORDER BY revenue DESC;