Introducing Ingres System Administration

The System Administrator Guide provides a comprehensive look at Ingres^® from the perspective of the system administrator. This chapter introduces various conventions and notations followed throughout the guide.

Audience

The System Administrator Guide is designed for the system administrator who has overall responsibility for the operation of the Ingres installation. The system administrator must have a solid working knowledge of operating system management or be in close contact with the operating system administrator.

Special Considerations

Before using this guide, you should be aware of the following issues.

Ingres installations can be administered in compliance with the C2 security standard.

If you are using an Enterprise Access product, see your Enterprise Access documentation for information about syntax that may differ from that described in this guide.

Ingres is compliant with ISO Entry SQL92. In addition, numerous vendor extensions are included. For details about the settings required to operate in compliance with ISO Entry SQL92, see the SQL Reference Guide.

Query Language Used in This Guide

The industry standard query language, SQL, is used as the standard query language throughout this guide.

QUEL commands and system parameters, such as environment variables or logicals, are also included in this guide. For a complete description of available QUEL statements, see the QUEL 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.

Path Notation in This Guide

The directory structure of an Ingres installation is the same regardless of operating system. Rather than showing path examples for all environments, this guide uses UNIX notation only.

For example: When describing the location of the collation sequence file, the guide shows: $II_SYSTEM/ingres/files/collation/collation_name.

On Windows, the location is:
%II_SYSTEM%\ingres\files\collation\collation_name

On VMS, the location is:
II_SYSTEM:[INGRES.FILES.COLLATION]collation_name

Terminology Used in This Guide

This guide uses the following terminology:

• A command is an operation that you execute at the operating system level. An extended operation invoked by a command is often referred to as a utility.
• A statement is an operation that you embed within 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 syntax: