Tools for Provisioning Database-Resident Information

Sybase Data Federation database connectors, database operations, and SQL views make database data accessible to users and applications.

To make relational data accessible to Data Federation, you create an entry in the data catalog that represents a connection to a database. This kind of catalog entry is called a database connector. A database connector encapsulates information such as the JDBC driver, connect string, and username and password that Data Federation will use to connect to the database, as well as other useful information such as how to contact the appropriate database administrator.

Once you establish a connection to a database, you can make data from that database available to Data Federation in the following ways:

Provision SQL views
When you provision a SQL view, you make a table in a provisioned database known to Data Federation. Data Federation extracts the metadata for the table and uses it to create an object called a SQL view in the data catalog. Provisioned SQL views (or tables) are treated like relational tables by the Data Federation virtual database’s query engine. When you create connectors to one or more databases and provision SQL views from each of those databases into Data Federation, you create a single virtual database. You can execute SQL queries on these tables as if they were tables in a single database. Data Federation’s query engine will analyze these queries, push as much of the work as possible down to the actual database, and perform the remaining operations (such as joins across tables from different databases) itself.
Create database operations
A database operation is the vehicle through which users and applications have access to data in relational databases. Each database operation is a data catalog entry that accesses one relational database and encapsulates a single SQL statement, such as CALL (a stored procedure invocation), SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. Database operations can take parameters. When you connect to a Data Federation domain through ODBC or JDBC, database operations appear as (and can be invoked as) stored procedures (using SQL CALL syntax). They can also be invoked via SOAP.

The output of a database operation is one or more SQL result sets that conform to the Java rowset abstraction.

Data Federation generates a schema that represents the output result set of the operation. You can view this schema either from the web user interface (web UI) or from WorkSpace Data Federation, or you can access it via JDBC. You can also generate SQL views from database operations that do not update the underlying database.

Use database operations to encapsulate optimized, reusable queries against an underlying database. Database operations, in addition to being invocable directly, can be used as input sources for data services that you model and deploy from WorkSpace Data Federation.

Data Federation database connectors, SQL views, and database operations are typically set up by database administrators. You must be a member of the DatabaseAdministrators group to perform these set-up tasks.