SEQUOIA 2000 ILLUSTRA GLOSSARY

All terms are deliberately in lower-case to aid sorting/searching.

The glossary is very much work in progress. If you come across a term you don't understand or spot verbiage from another database vendor (oops), please let Jean Anderson know.

elmd

elmd is the daemon for the Elan License Manager, the license management software used by Illustra. Man pages are in the back of the Illustra System Administrator's Guide.

from list

"A from_list is used in a select statement or subquery to indicate the expressions, tables, views, or versions from which data is to be retrieved [Illustra User's Guide, section 3.7]." In the following example, Grid is in the from list: * select * from Grid;

join predicate

A join predicate joins two objects in the search condition. In the following example, the experiment and Grid tables are joined in a join predicate: * select e.* from experiment e, Grid g where e.id=g.id;

libmi

libmi is a C interface to an Illustra database.

midaemon

midaemon is the Illustra daemon that services requests to access a database.

illustra

Illustra is the commercial version of POSTGRES.

msql

msql is a UNIX command that provides interactive access to an Illustra database.

search condition

"A search_condition specifies the characteristics of rows to be affected by a query or rule. It consists of one or more boolean conditions (predicates) which evaluate to TRUE, FALSE, or UNKNOWN." [Illustra User's Guide, Section 3.18]

server process

Every client process, such as msql, has a corresponding process on the Illustra Server called a server process.

sql

SQL is a query language for interacting with Illustra.

sql function

A SQL function is a collection of SQL commands packaged together.

vacuum

vacuum removes historical data and unreferenced large objects. It also may update statistics if that option is specified. See the Illustra User's Guide, Section 2.52.

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Last modified 30-June-94 (Illustra Rev 2.0.12)