Glossary

ACID

See atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability

American National Standards Institute

the organization that coordinates the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. ANSI works with the International Organization for Standardization to establish global standards. Short form: ANSI.

ANSI

See American National Standards Institute

API

See application programming interface

application programming interface

a set of software functions that facilitate communication between applications and other types of programs or services. Short form: API.

Application Response Measurement

the name of an application programming interface that was developed by an industry partnership and which is used to monitor the availability and performance of software applications. ARM monitors the application tasks that are important to a particular business. Short form: ARM.

ARM

See Application Response Measurement

atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability

the characteristics of a transaction, such as a group of SQL statements, in an RDBMS that support commit and rollback operations. The characteristics include atomicity (the execution of a transaction, either committed or rolled back); consistency (the successful application of the consistency rules of an RDBMS that commits only valid data to the database); isolation (the separation of a transaction from all other concurrent processes in an RDBMS); and durability (the persistence or repeatability of a transaction under all conditions, including system failure, after which a transaction can be re-created from a log that contains committed transactions). Short form: ACID

authentication

See client authentication

authorization

the process of determining the permissions that particular users have for particular resources. Authorization either permits or denies a specific action on a specific resource, based on the user's identity and on group memberships.

client authentication

the process of verifying the identity of a person or process for security purposes.

connection string

information that defines how to connect an application to the data. In SAS Federation Server, a connection string identifies the query language syntax that the application submits, as well as the information that is required to connect to a data source or data sources.

data source name

a persistent identifier that is associated with a data source definition. The data source definition specifies how to locate and access a data source, including any authentication (such as a user name and password) that a user must provide. Short form: DSN.

data type

an attribute of every column in a table or database, indicating the type of data in the column and how much physical storage it occupies.

definer's rights view

a view that is created by a schema owner. Definer's rights views are required for data caching in SAS Federation Server.

driver

a special-purpose software program that enables two disparate software programs, such as an application and an API, to interact.

DSN

See data source name

encryption

the act or process of converting data to a form that is unintelligible except to the intended recipients.

federated DSN

a data source name that references multiple data sources. The data sources can be on the same DBMS, or on a different one.

grouping data source name

See federated DSN

grouping DSN

See federated DSN

Integrated Object Model

the set of distributed object interfaces that make SAS software features available to client applications when SAS is executed as an object server. Short form: IOM.

invoker's rights view

a federated view or cache that is accessed using the current user’s authorization instead of the schema owner’s authorization. See also "definer's rights view."

IOM

See Integrated Object Model

Java Virtual Machine

a software application that can execute Java bytecode, on either a client or a server, enabling Java programs to be run on many different hardware and software platforms. Short form: JVM.

join

an operation that combines data from two or more tables. A join is typically created by means of SQL (Structured Query Language) code or a user interface.

JVM

See Java Virtual Machine

MDS

See Memory Data Store

Memory Data Store

a transactional data cache that runs strictly in-memory. Because there is no back up data storage, changes are lost when the in-memory database is closed.

result set

the set of rows or records that a server or other application returns in response to a query.

RLS

See row-level security

RLS predicate

See row-level security predicate

row-level security

a security feature that controls access to rows and columns in a table in order to prevent users from accessing restricted data.

row-level security predicate

a query that restricts the rows that are available to grantees for specified operations. Only rows that match the predicate can be accessed by the grantees.

scrollable cursor

a device that enables an application to set a position on any row in a result set. For example, a scrollable cursor can back up and revisit a row, start at the end of the file and work backward, skip some rows, or go directly to a specific row.

serializability

a capability commonly required in database processing that ensures the highest level of isolation between transactions for the purposes of concurrency control.

SQL

See Structured Query Language

Structured Query Language

a standardized, high-level query language that is used in relational database management systems to create and manipulate objects in a database management system. SAS implements SQL through the SQL procedure. Short form: SQL.

thread

the smallest unit of processing that can be scheduled by an operating system.

threaded processing

processing that is performed in multiple threads in order to improve the speed of CPU-bound applications.

time-out

an error condition that is produced when a required response from a device or program is not received after a specified length of time.

transactional data store

a storage mechanism for transactional data that is characterized by ACID features (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability).

type

See data type

Unicode

a 16-bit encoding that is the industry standard for supporting the interchange, processing, and display of characters and symbols from most of the world's writing systems.