googleapis/genai-toolbox

MCP Toolbox for Databases is an open source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that connects your AI agents, IDEs, and applications directly to your enterprise databases.
It serves a **dual purpose**:
1. **Ready-to-use MCP Server (Build-Time):** Instantly connect Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity, Claude Code, Codex, or other MCP clients to your databases using our *prebuilt generic tools*. Talk to your data, explore schemas, and generate code without writing boilerplate.
2. **Custom Tools Framework (Run-Time):** A robust framework to build specialized, highly secure AI tools for your production agents. Define structured queries, semantic search, and NL2SQL capabilities safely and easily.
This README provides a brief overview. For comprehensive details, see the full documentation.
> [!IMPORTANT]
> **Repository Name Update:** The genai-toolbox repository has been officially renamed to mcp-toolbox. To ensure your local environment reflects the new name, you may update your remote:
> git remote set-url origin https://github.com/googleapis/mcp-toolbox.git
> [!NOTE]
> This solution was originally named “Gen AI Toolbox for Databases” (github.com/googleapis/genai-toolbox) as its initial development predated MCP, but was renamed to align with the MCP compatibility.
Table of Contents
- Why MCP Toolbox?
- Quick Start: Prebuilt Tools
- Quick Start: Custom Tools
- Install & Run the Toolbox server
- Connect to Toolbox
- MCP Client
- Toolbox SDKs: Integrate with your Application
- Additional Features
- Versioning
- Contributing
- Community
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Why MCP Toolbox?
- **Out-of-the-Box Database Access:** Prebuilt generic tools for instant data exploration (e.g., list_tables, execute_sql) directly from your IDE or CLI.
- **Custom Tools Framework:** Build production-ready tools with your own predefined logic, ensuring safety through Restricted Access, Structured Queries, and Semantic Search.
- **Simplified Development:** Integrate tools into your Agent Development Kit (ADK), LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom agents in less than 10 lines of code.
- **Better Performance:** Handles connection pooling, integrated auth (IAM), and end-to-end observability (OpenTelemetry) out of the box.
- **Enhanced Security**: Integrated authentication for more secure access to your data.
- **End-to-end Observability**: Out of the box metrics and tracing with built-in support for OpenTelemetry.
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Quick Start: Prebuilt Tools
Stop context-switching and let your AI assistant become a true co-developer. By connecting your IDE to your databases with MCP Toolbox, you can query your data in plain English, automate schema discovery and management, and generate database-aware code.
You can use the Toolbox in any MCP-compatible IDE or client (e.g., Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity, Claude Code, Codex, etc.) by configuring the MCP server.
**Prebuilt tools are also conveniently available via the Google Antigravity MCP Store with a simple click-to-install experience.**
1. Add the following to your client's MCP configuration file (usually mcp.json or claude_desktop_config.json):
2. Set the appropriate environment variables to connect, see the Prebuilt Tools Reference.
When you run Toolbox with a --prebuilt= flag, you instantly get access to standard tools to interact with that database. You can also specify a specific toolset using the --prebuilt= / syntax (e.g., --prebuilt=postgres/data to only load SQL tools).
Supported databases currently include:
- **Google Cloud:** AlloyDB, BigQuery, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server), Spanner, Firestore, Knowledge Catalog (formerly known as Dataplex).
- **Other Databases:** PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, CockroachDB, ClickHouse, Couchbase, Neo4j, Snowflake, Trino, and more.
For a full list of available tools and their capabilities across all supported databases, see the Prebuilt Tools Reference.
*See the Install & Run the Toolbox server section for different execution methods like Docker or binaries.*