Database Operations

A database operation is the vehicle through which users and applications have access to data in relational databases.

Each database operation accesses one relational database. The data owner (typically a database administrator who has responsibility for that database) creates the database operation as an entry in the data catalog, giving it a name and a definition. The definition can be any SQL statement the database accepts (INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, CALL). When you define a database operation that contains a SQL statement and grant access to that database operation, you are granting rights to run that statement in the database.

Database operations return SQL result sets. They can also accept and return parameters. For example, you could set up a statement that returned order details given a specific order number, and then supply the order number at runtime.

Data Federation supports distributed transactions using the two-phase commit protocol. Using a data service, you can configure a set of database operations to be executed as a group in a single transaction.

A database operation whose source database is the Data Federation virtual database is called a virtual database operation. Use virtual database operations if you want to encapsulate and reuse SQL SELECT queries against SQL views.

The results of a database operation can be cached either on-demand or in a scheduled manner—in one or more caching services—thereby reducing load on back-end databases, decreasing latency, and controlling use of network bandwidth. Cache coherence is controlled with configurable coherence windows.

You can create database operations using any of the following:

WorkSpace Data Federation
The Data Federation web UI (see the Data Federation Provisioning and Advanced Data Integration Guide, part of the DI Suite documentation set, which is available on the Sybase Product Manuals Web site at http://sybooks.sybase.com)
The Data Federation command line interface (see the Data Federation Command Reference, part of the DI Suite documentation set, which is available on the Sybase Product Manuals Web site at http://sybooks.sybase.com)