Q:

Specifying the DB to connect with gcloud sql

When connecting to a Google Cloud SQL instance, is there a way to specify the database I want to connect to? 
This is the command I execute and the error I get:
$ gcloud beta sql connect MY_INSTANCE --user=MY_USER
Whitelisting your IP for incoming connection for 5 minutes...done. 
Connecting to database with SQL user [MY_USER].Password for user MY_USER:
psql: FATAL:  database "MY_USER" does not exist

It seems to try to connect to a database that has the same name than the user, but what when that's not the case? ( I don't want to create a dummy DB called MY_USER just to be able to jump to the DB I want). 
Here are the docs for the command gcloud beta sql, but I don't see anything useful for this there: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/sql/connect

A:

gcloud sql connect does not currently allow you to specify the database name.  There is a open issue to add it: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/69314375
In the meantime, you can work around this by utilizing the PGDATABASE environment variable:
e.g.
PGDATABASE=mydb gcloud sql connect myinstance

You could create a shell alias to do this for you. 

A:

In the meanwhile the beta version of the gcloud sql connect command has added support for a --database=<dbname> flag
Entire command:
gcloud beta sql connect INSTANCE [--database=DATABASE, -d DATABASE] [--user=USER, -u USER] [GCLOUD_WIDE_FLAG …]
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/sql/connect

