Transition to KDB7

Features

• Tables in a database are defined in a catalog
• Each table has an embedded table schema
• Support for up to 4 built in word indexes
• Indexes can be added or dropped
• BLOB support
• Autoextending tables
• Time and user stamping
• Compatible with the KDB Oracle implementation

You must explicitly connect to a named database, defined in the kconf.xml configuration file, using a call to KI_CONNECT and passing a connection handle allocated by KI_ALLOC_CONNECT. A database can be bootstrapped using CREATE DATABASE. A database contains a catalog table listing all the tables contained in the database.

A database has associated with it one or more tablespaces. These represent areas of storage that can hold the tables of the database and are usually directories in a Unix filesystem. Tablespaces are defined with CREATE TABLESPACE SQL statements.

Tables are created and dropped using CREATE TABLE and DROP TABLE SQL statements processed by KI_SQL. Indexes can be added or dropped later with separate CREATE INDEX and DROP INDEX SQL statements. There is no support for KI_CREATE, KI_EXTEND or KI_GROW.

KDB7 tables are organized into fixed sized pages, usually 8kb in size, which effectively limit the maximum row size to the page size less a few bytes. The page size is set when the table is created.

Indexes must have unique keys which are defined in terms of columns.

a ROWID for a KDB7 table requires 6 bytes but should be defined using the constant _KDB_MAX_ROWID_LEN to be compatible with Oracle and other SQL databases.