Protecting Production Databases

Sybase Data Federation is designed to help database administrators insulate production databases from risk.

Because users and applications have access to data from the original source, you might be concerned about how this might affect production systems. After all, database administrators must ensure that production applications they support perform well. Data Federation helps database administrators insulate their production databases from risk:

By providing access to data through stored procedures.
Stored procedures are totally under the control of the DBA and have been optimized for the database.
By limiting access to all but specific, predefined queries.
Database administrators provide the queries used by users and application developers, and can define and test queries that perform efficiently before making them available.
By caching results.
Access to relational data does not have to be dynamic as long as users and developers can retrieve reasonably fresh data. Data Federation enables database administrators to cache results—either on-demand or on a predetermined schedule—so users never need direct access to the database. Results can be cached as frequently as required to meet the needs of data consumers. Caching has no impact on applications; no special coding is involved in using cached data.
By enabling access through data services and generated views.
When users need data in nonrelational forms, DBAs can provide generated views or data services, then grant access to those objects. The views or data services can be updated on a schedule, or updated when the database operation is updated.
By using transactional data services.
A developer can build a transactional data service that executes a set of related operations as a single transaction—if any operation in the set cannot be completed, all the operations are rolled back. This ensures that databases remain in a consistent state.