# Get Started with Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud Enable a Lightning Table for an Apache Kafka® topic, and then query it with SQL in the Confluent Cloud Console. #### IMPORTANT Lightning Tables are rolling out to Confluent Cloud accounts in phases. If you don’t see this feature, it’s not available for your account at this time. ## Prerequisites Before you begin, make sure that you have the following: - A Kafka topic in a Confluent Cloud cluster. - A schema for the topic. If the topic doesn’t have one, the Cloud Console prompts you to create one when you enable the Lightning Table. For more information, see [Enable a Lightning Table for a topic without a schema](manage.md#lightning-tables-manage-no-schema). ## Enable a Lightning Table for a topic When you enable a Lightning Table for a topic, Confluent Cloud makes the topic data available for low-latency SQL queries. To enable one, complete the following steps. 1. Sign in to the Confluent Cloud Console at [https://confluent.cloud/](https://confluent.cloud/). 2. From the navigation menu, select **Environments**. 3. Select your environment. 4. From the navigation menu, select **Clusters**. 5. Select your cluster. 6. From the navigation menu, select **Lightning Tables**. 7. On the **Lightning Tables** page, click **Add Lightning Table**. If the cluster doesn’t have any Lightning Tables yet, click **Enable Lightning Table** instead. A dialog opens that lists the topics in your cluster. The list shows only topics that have a schema. To show topics without a schema, clear the **Has schema** checkbox. ![Dialog that lists the topics in a cluster, with an Enable link for each topic in the Lightning Table column.](lightning-tables/images/lightning-tables-enable-topic-list.png) 8. In the **Lightning Table** column for your topic, click **Enable**. 9. In the confirmation dialog, click **Enable**. Enabling a Lightning Table takes several minutes. You can close the dialog and check back later. ## Query the Lightning Table When setup completes, a dialog opens that confirms the Lightning Table is enabled. Here, you can query the Lightning Table with SQL. ![Dialog that confirms a Lightning Table is enabled, with SQL, API, and MCP tabs and a prefilled SQL query.](lightning-tables/images/lightning-tables-enabled-dialog.png) To run your first query, complete the following steps. 1. On the **SQL** tab, review the prefilled query. The query returns up to 100 rows from your topic: ```sql SELECT * FROM `` LIMIT 100; ``` 2. Click **Run**. The dialog closes, and the **Preview Lightning Table** pane opens and shows the results. To explore your data further, you can edit the query in the pane and run it again. ![Preview Lightning Table pane that shows a completed SQL query and a grid of results.](lightning-tables/images/lightning-tables-preview-pane-results.png) 3. When you finish querying, close the pane. In addition to the **SQL** tab, the pane has the following tabs with sample code that you can copy: - **API**: A curl command that sends a POST request to query the Lightning Table. - **MCP**: An `npx` command that opens the MCP Inspector, so you can try the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Lightning Table. To open the pane again later, see [Query a Lightning Table in the Cloud Console](manage.md#lightning-tables-manage-query). If you access the Lightning Table over a private network, you can’t run queries in the Cloud Console. Use the associated private endpoint for the API or MCP instead. For more information, see [Private Networking for Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud](private-networking.md#lightning-tables-private-networking). ## Next steps To learn more about working with Lightning Tables, see the following pages: - [Manage Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud](manage.md#lightning-tables-manage) - [Private Networking for Lightning Tables in Confluent Cloud](private-networking.md#lightning-tables-private-networking) - [Lightning Queries in Confluent Cloud](../ai/real-time-context-engine/lightning-queries.md#rtce-lightning-queries) - [Query Data from the Real-Time Context Engine in Confluent Cloud](../ai/real-time-context-engine/query-data.md#rtce-query-data) #### NOTE This website includes content developed at the [Apache Software Foundation](https://www.apache.org/) under the terms of the [Apache License v2](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html).