Maintaining a Distributed Database

This chapter explains various aspects of maintaining a distributed database. It describes the statements and commands for creating, naming, and populating your distributed database.

Distributed Database Maintenance Tasks

A distributed database can be made up of tables, views, procedures, and indexes in local Ingres databases, remote Ingres databases, and non-Ingres databases accessible through Enterprise Access products.

Database maintenance tasks include:

• Creating distributed databases

  Note: You are not limited in the number of databases that you can create. You can create as many databases as your operating system allows.

• Destroying databases
• Creating tables and views on distributed databases
• Removing tables and views
• Registering (defining to Ingres Star) tables, views, and procedures (indexes are registered automatically)
• Refreshing registered tables or views
• Removing registrations

VDBA and Distributed Database Maintenance

You can use Visual DBA to maintain a distributed database. Use the Databases branch in the Database Object Manager window.

The following topics in the VDBA online help contain procedures to maintain distributed databases:

• Creating a Database

  Note: To create a database, you need the createdb privilege. This subject privilege is granted by default to the system administrator, who in turn can grant it to other users, such as database administrators, who need to create databases. For more information on subject privileges, see the Database Administrator Guide.

• Dropping a Database
• Creating a Table on a Distributed Database (choose Creating a Table first)
• Creating a View
• Dropping a Table
• Dropping a View
• Registering a Distributed Table or View
• Registering a Distributed Procedure
• Refreshing Registered Tables and Views
• Removing Registrations

Commands for Performing Distributed Database Maintenance

Distributed databases can also be created and destroyed by the createdb and destroydb commands, which are executed at the operating system level. For more information, see Createdb Command and Destroydb Command.

Statements for Performing Distributed Database Maintenance

Some tasks can be accomplished using statements, which can be issued from an interactive session with SQL or ISQL, or from an application.

These statements are as follows:

• The create statement to create new tables and views in the distributed database and automatically register them
• The drop statement to remove tables and views from the distributed database
• The register as link statement to define existing tables, views, indexes, and database procedures as component objects of the distributed database
• The register as link with refresh statement to register local updates to tables, views, and indexes that are part of the distributed database
• The remove statement to remove the registration of database objects previously incorporated with the register and create statements

By default, the data definition language (DDL) statements create, drop, register, and remove are all committed immediately, independently of the user's transaction. To learn how to turn off concurrency, see DDL Concurrency Mode.