Federated Tables and Gateways

TIBCO Patterns directly supports federated tables through a gateway server. Although this feature has little impact on the API described in this document some understanding of federated tables and gateway servers are useful. A brief description of the important points is given here. For a full description see the TIBCO® Patterns Installation guide and the TIBCO® Patterns Concepts.

A federated table is a table that is physically split into multiple tables residing on separate TIBCO Patterns servers (usually on separate machines). This splitting is intended for those cases where a table is simply too large to fit on a single machine. It might also be done to reduce latency times when performing a search. The records of the logical table are divided among the physical tables that comprise the logical table.

A gateway is a special TIBCO Patterns server process that manages one or more federated tables. It maps operations on the logical table into operations on the individual physical tables in the respective TIBCO Patterns server processes.

More specifically a gateway manages a cluster of TIBCO Patterns server processes, each such process being referred to as a node.

All operations performed through a gateway on federated tables are done in an identical manner to operations on a standard table on a standard TIBCO Patterns server process.

Gateways also manage thesauri, character maps, and Learn Models.