Extensibility Interfaces

Extensibility interfaces fall into the following classes:

• DBMS interfaces

• Cartridge basic service interfaces

• Data cartridge interfaces

DBMS Interfaces

The DBMS interfaces are the simplest kind of extensibility services. DBMS interfaces are made available through extensions to SQL or to the Oracle Call Interface (OCI). For example, the extensible type manager utilizes the CREATE TYPE syntax in SQL. Similarly, extensible indexing uses DDL and DML support for specifying and manipulating indexes.

Cartridge Basic Service Interfaces

Generic interfaces provide basic services like memory management, context management, internationalization, and cartridge-specific management. These cartridge basic interface services are used by data cartridges to implement behavior for new datatypes in the context of the server's execution environment. These services provide helper routines that make it easy for data cartridge developers to write robust, portable server-side methods.

Data Cartridge Interfaces

Sometimes the DBMS needs to call the data cartridge functions for implementations provided by the data cartridge developer. So, for user-defined indexing, the DBMS must use the implementation of the index interface whenever an index search or fetch operation is performed. For user-defined query optimization, the query optimizer must call functions implemented by the data cartridge to compute cost of user-defined operators or functions.

These standard data cartridge functions are similar to callback functions that the DBMS can invoke. In the future, data cartridge interfaces will be made available to enable the data cartridge to include the specifications for such functions.