InterBase 2020 is up and running and full of new features. On this weeks’ blog, we’re showcasing our support for Tablespaces.
What is Database Tablespace?
Tablespaces allow for better performance and a more balanced and optimized use of the hardware. Tablespaces allow a database object definition to specify a storage location in a particular logical file collection. This is especially beneficial for disk technologies, allowing you to better mix the use of fast SSDs and large HDDs.
Why is the feature valuable?
Tablespaces allow the database developer and administrator to enhance the performance and portability of the database for the end-user.
The developer can choose to colocate related tables and indexes in specific secondary tablespaces or store large archival data tables in tablespaces that can be placed in slower/economical storage mediums like HDDs while allowing the smaller more frequently accessed data to be resident in tablespaces that are stored in underlying faster storage mediums like SSDs.
At a production site, an individual or a set of tablespaces can be backed up and restored without needing to backup/restore the whole database. This reduces the maintenance downtime for VLDBs where compacting database files and index rebuilding may be a necessity from time to time. Tablespaces with large archival data can be left out of this backup/restore process. The backup/restore functionality also allows quick restoration of initialized data, while optionally keeping newly defined tables in restored tablespace intact.
In past releases of InterBase, database size was limited to an upper limit of 32TB. With the introduction of secondary tablespaces in InterBase 2020, a database can grow up to 8160 TBs to fully utilize the PRIMARY tablespace and 254 secondary tablespaces.
In the future, we are planning to enhance individual tablespaces to define their own encryption and database cache properties to align with production site needs. We also plan to make tablespaces that carry their own metadata to be transportable between different host databases, to facilitate the sharing of static lookup data; the automountable use of tablespaces will play a critical role in this use case.
How is this feature different from other solutions?
Database tablespaces are a popular offering from various enterprise-grade database vendors. The InterBase solution delivers valuable benefits via tablespace support to our customers as their database needs grow over time.
InterBase also provides OOTB support in our command-line and GUI tooling to easily set up and administer tablespaces. An index automatically resides in the same tablespace as their host table unless customized to reside in another tablespace.
Explore Further
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase/version-history
Docwiki: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/InterBase/2020/en/Tablespace
Youtube videos:
InterBase 2020 features: https://youtu.be/hlLmP-NbKpw?t=767
Product Portal:
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase