Storage & data · Database source
The number in your report is the number in the system
With the Database source the number everyone quotes in the weekly report stops being whatever the query said when someone last ran it. The page runs the query itself - PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Amazon Redshift, CockroachDB, Snowflake, IBM Db2 or ClickHouse - so what your readers see is what is in the system.
Your DBA gets a guarantee, not a promise
Every query is parsed before it runs: one statement, and it has to be a SELECT. The
connection is opened read-only, the session is put in a read-only transaction where
the engine supports one, and the query has a ten-second timeout. Even the MySQL
trick of hiding a write inside an executable /*! ... */ comment is
rejected outright. A read-only database user on top is still good practice, but it
is not what the guarantee rests on - so the question your DBA asks first has an
answer that is not "should not".
Your pages carry no host, no user and no password
An administrator registers the connection - JDBC URL, user, password, encrypted before storage - and names it. A macro refers to that name and a query, nothing else. Restrict the connection to particular Confluence groups and only they build pages on it; everyone else just reads the result.
You write the SELECT once and the page is right every time
The query returns a single value - the first column of the first row - and the macro renders whatever that value holds: CSV becomes a table, JSON a tree, Markdown a document, a Mermaid definition a diagram, and a PDF or image stored as a blob comes out as the file itself, up to 25 MB. Nobody exports a CSV on a Monday, nobody forgets to, and the number in your document is the number in the system rather than a memory of it.
What the other apps leave you pasting
Across the 630 Marketplace apps in our comparison snapshot, two carry a database source and both are Jira-only. For Confluence there is effectively nothing - which is why live figures in a wiki are usually a person, a query tool and a paste. Here you get them in 27 of the 31 macros, reading through a connection that cannot write anything back.
Database is one of 13 places Macro Pack reads from
One app, one licence, one connection your admin sets up - and 12 more places a page can pull content from, whether that is a page attachment, a Git repository, an S3 bucket or your database.
See every source compared