Introducing Database Administration

This guide provides Ingres® database administrators with information about creating, maintaining, backing up, and recovering databases, as well as instructions for defining various types of users, authorizing user access, and working with different types of database objects.

Audience

This guide is primarily intended for database administrators. In some cases, however, the responsibilities of the database administrator and the system administrator overlap. Therefore, some of the tasks and responsibilities described in this guide require permissions typically given to the system administrator, but not necessarily given to database administrators. In these cases, you must work with your system administrator to carry out these responsibilities.

What You Need to Know

This guide assumes that you are familiar with the windowing system on the target platform of the installation, including terminology, navigational techniques, and working with standard items, such as menus and dialogs.

Database Administrators

In Ingres, anyone who creates a database becomes the database administrator (DBA) for that database. Furthermore, there is no limit on the number of DBAs that can exist at a site.

Note: Before you can create a database, you must have the createdb privilege.

The DBA has permission to do the following:

• Create and destroy databases
• Manage public database objects
• Manage user access to data through grants on tables, views, procedures, and other objects
• Maintain database and query performance
• Monitor locking to maximize concurrency
• Back up and recover the database
• Authorize databases to use alternate locations

Query Language Used in this Guide

The industry standard query language, SQL, is used as the standard query language throughout this guide. Ingres is compliant with ISO Entry SQL-92. For details about the settings required to operate in compliance with ISO Entry SQL-92, see the SQL Reference Guide.

System-specific Text in this Guide

Generally, Ingres operates the same way on all systems. When necessary, however, this guide provides information specific to your operating system. For example:

UNIX: Information is specific to the UNIX environment.

VMS: Information is specific to the VMS environment.

Windows: Information is specific to the Windows environment.

When necessary for clarity, the symbol is used to indicate the end of system-specific text.

For sections that pertain to one system only, the system is indicated in the section title.

Terminology Used in this Guide

This guide uses the following terminology:

• A command is an operation that you execute at the operating system level.
• A statement is an operation that you embed in a program or execute interactively from a terminal monitor.

Note: A statement can be written in Ingres 4GL, a host programming language (such as C), or a database query language (SQL or QUEL).

Syntax Conventions Used in this Guide

This guide uses the following conventions to describe command and statement syntax: