Importing a Database Driver

To use database/sql you’ll need the package itself, as well as a driver for the specific database you want to use.

You generally shouldn’t use driver packages directly, although some drivers encourage you to do so. (In our opinion, it’s usually a bad idea.) Instead, your code should only refer to types defined in database/sql, if possible. This helps avoid making your code dependent on the driver, so that you can change the underlying driver (and thus the database you’re accessing) with minimal code changes. It also forces you to use the Go idioms instead of ad-hoc idioms that a particular driver author may have provided.

In this documentation, we’ll use the excellent MySQL drivers from @julienschmidt and @arnehormann for examples.

Add the following to the top of your Go source file:

import (
	"database/sql"
	_ "github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql"
)

Notice that we’re loading the driver anonymously, aliasing its package qualifier to _ so none of its exported names are visible to our code. Under the hood, the driver registers itself as being available to the database/sql package, but in general nothing else happens with the exception that the init function is run.

Now you’re ready to access a database.