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Glossary

This page contains definitions for key concepts and commonly used terms.

Agg

Aggregator.

Available (DAP)

A DAP is available if:

  1. The RC has not dispatched a request to the DAP. Upon dispatching a request to it, the RC marks the DAP as unavailable until the DAP notifies the RC of completion.
  2. The DAP has reported itself as available to the RC. A DAP may be registered with the RC, but explicitly mark itself unavailable while it is busy performing other tasks, which include:
    • Log replay: on initialization, the DAP marks itself unavailable until log replay has completed.
    • End-of-day or end-of-interval reload: the DAP marks itself unavailable on receipt of a reload signal from the storage manager. Once the reload is complete, it marks itself as available again.

DAP

Data Access Process.

Feasible (DAP)

A DAP is feasible if it is both available and up to date. If a DAP is feasible, the RC can select it to service requests. If a DAP is not feasible, the RC ignores it when selecting DAPs.

GW

Gateway.

Purview

DAP metadata provided to the RC to determine data locality. See Purviews.

Primary RC and secondary RCs

A running system may have multiple RC replicas. Each DAP is owned by a unique RC. That is, the DAP's unique RC has unilateral authority to assign work to it. In this way, each RC owns a set of DAPs, and no two sets intersect. The RC-DAP association rules are described in .

When a client makes an API request to the Gateway (GW), the GW sends the request to one RC. That RC is called the primary RC of the request. The primary RC may or may not have all the required DAPs necessary to serve the request, and thus may enlist one or more other RCs to assist; these are called secondary RCs. The secondary RCs distribute the request to their DAPs on the primary RC's behalf, since the primary RC has no right to assign work to a secondary RC's DAPs directly.

RC

Resource Coordinator.

Reference vintage

Each DAP reports to the RC the stream position of the last reference data update it received . This stream position is the DAP's reference vintage (often denoted refVintage). The RC maintains the maximum reference vintage for each distinct label set. A DAP is up-to-date if its reference vintage is equal to the maximum reference vintage for its label set. This ensures that requests are not sent to DAPs with outdated date.

Note: The reference vintage check is done across RCs. See Routing - Example 13.

Logical database

A logical database is a collection of assemblies that use matching labels to shard data. These assemblies are all deployed and managed independently from a resource and management point of view. However, from a query point of view, these assemblies appear as a single database. A query that references a table that is common to all assemblies in a logical database will be distributed across all instances and aggregated into a single result.

Virtual Columns

A virtual column is a column in a table that is manifested dynamically in memory and is not stored physically on disk. For example, the i column in a kdb+ table is the index of a row in the table which only exists when querying the table with qSQL.