Interfaces

User Interface

A VectorSTAR server can be accessed in several ways:

• console: monolithically, often directly from the console, where the user interface (UI) is running in the same process as the database

• client-server: from the same or a different network node, via sockets

• web: from anywhere on the internet/intranet, using the HTTP/HTTPS protocol

Console Mode DBA

The console mode is the most flexible of the three and thus the one often most adequate for doing development on VectorSTAR. However, it offers little in terms of security and it exposes the whole underlying programming language facilities to the user, so it should not be used for deployment of end-user applications.

In this mode, both the UI (used to enter VectorSQL commands) and the actual database code are running on the same OS process, which will show on your CPU task list as a j.exe process on a Windows OS or its equivalent on a Linux OS. It is a very lightweight process that fires up practically immediately and typically does not consume more than 500K-750K of RAM initially. This process is not multithreaded: you run multiple copies of a similar one (without the UI overhead) to support multiple users in client-server and web configurations. The sheer simplicity of this arrangement means that you can effectively use the underlying OS process administration facilities to manage your VectorSTAR database. This is in stark contrast to other DBMS systems that fire up so many obscure processes that it becomes very hard to know what each one does.

After installing VectorSTAR in console mode, you run one of the available console programs that provide a UI to the underlying VectorSTAR process.

Programming Language APIs

C, C++, Java, Microsoft CLR languages.

R statistical programming system

There are two choices for interacting with R:

• socket-based approach provided by JSoftware with the J programming environment

• memory-mapped file-based approach provided by VectorSTAR

Socket-based R interface

REQUIRE 'R'

USE 'Store'

OPEN 'Sale,Product'

(GET 'Sale.Price') R 'sd($1)'

=> 289.49517039958

...alternatively, we may directly import the std dev function from R:

'R' IMPORT 'sd($1)'

sd GET 'Sale.Price'

=> 289.49517039958

JOIN_USING 'What'

GROUP_BY 'Product.Department'

SELECT 'group, sd Qty'

ProductDepartment SdQty

FURNITURE 5.77

APPLIANCES 4.20

CLOTHING 3.41

ELECTRONICS 120.3

Excel Spreadsheet

VectorSQL provides the following Excel-related functionality:

• directly importing an XLS file into a VectorSTAR database

• outputting XLS format as a result of a query

• live connection to a running Excel spreadsheet so that the results of a query are immediately reflected as a new sheet (usually as a pivot table)

• using Excel as a command console to VectorSTAR (i.e., the user may type free-form VectorSQL commands on a cell, and the results will be shown on the same worksheet immediately)