Ingres ICE Features

New features added to the internal performance of Ingres/ICE concern security, session management, storage management, and macro language extensions.

Ingres ICE Security Enhancements

The security model for Ingres/ICE has been enhanced to provide additional levels of control for access and for content. The model also assists in the maintenance of large numbers of Internet users by defining profiles and roles.

Profiles enable Internet users to register themselves by automatically transferring a predefined set of privileges to the user when the first login is attempted.

Password authentication for intranets may be specified as OS for use with domain servers and authentication servers.

Ingres ICE Session Management Enhancements

Ingres/ICE uses cookies to identify individual sessions. The session identifier enables maintenance of session context between pages. Sessions have a configurable inactivity timeout that when reached rolls back any uncommitted transactions.

Storage Management

HTML Templates--Document content is made available through HTML template files. In Ingres II 2.5, access to the template files is abstracted to prevent exposure of queries and schema.

Document Cache Management--All files accessed within Ingres/ICE are subject to cache management, which specifies when the file may be closed or removed.

Macro Language Extensions

Macro language extensions in Ingres II 2.5 include:

• User identification
• State maintenance
• Variables
• Conditional statements
• Variable testing using the IF or SWITCH macros to provide conditional flow within template pages
• Include statements
• The FUNCTION macro, providing a mechanism for invoking C callable shared libraries and dynamic link libraries

Visual DBA Features

Visual DBA features in Ingres II 2.5 include:

• DOM windows—new design and features
• SQL/test—new design and features
• Star management
• Full Replicator management
• ICE management
• Enterprise access
• Miscellaneous new features

Replicator Enhancements

Enhancements have been made to the internal performance that concern the generic Replicator Server and increased replicator concurrency.

Generic Replicator Server

Ingres II 2.5 introduces a generic Replicator Server that is functionally identical to the custom repserver built by the user in previous releases. The generic Replicator Server can automatically handle any table that is configured by RepManager or Visual DBA without the need to compile or link a custom executable.

Increased Replicator Concurrency

In previous releases, updates to the Replicator shadow, archive, and input queue tables performed by the DBMS as a result of a replicated user update would use the same isolation level as the original update (serializable by default). This isolation level is unnecessary, since the unique key value in the base table must have already been locked for the update to take place. In this release, the isolation level has been decreased to read committed, allowing for improved concurrency of replicated updates.

OpenAPI Enhancements

Environment handles were added to OpenAPI. Environment handles allow greater application control over configuration of the OpenAPI runtime environment. OpenAPI version 2 was added to indicate support for environment handles.

Extensions were made to the following OpenAPI functions to support environment handles:

• IIapi_initialize() to allocate environment handles
• IIapi_connect() to open connections using environment settings

Three new environment handle associated functions were added:

• IIapi_setEnvParam() for setting environment configuration parameters
• IIapi_formatData() for converting data values relative to environment settings
• IIapi_releaseEnv() to release environment handle resources

Also added is the function IIapi_abort() to forcefully shut down connections under error conditions.