Basic Concepts
To use TDV extensibility effectively, it is important to know its basic concepts and terminology.
• Adapter refers to the connective software for a particular brand of data source (such as Oracle or PostgreSQL). An adapter can be configured to use a certain set of properties from the collection available for the adapter. The adapter can be configured to make some or all of these properties visible, required, and overrideable in the configuration window for each data source instance.
Adapters support relational data sources, and data sources whose intended JDBC driver allows applications to see them as relational, such as Hive via the Hive JDBC driver.
Extension adapters cannot inherit configurations from other extension adapters.
• A data source instance is a physical data source to which TDV connects. The instance is identified by its name and connection URL (for example, ds-ora-1:11521/dev1).
• Data source properties are defined by the adapter. Their values can be specified at the adapter level, or at the individual data source level, or both.
Data source properties fall into two groups:
— Properties that are characteristic of the kind of data source, such as data types, function support, and support for various language elements.
— Properties of individual data source instances, such as name, connection URL, login credentials, and settings that may differ from one instance to the next, such as case sensitivity and connection pool settings.