Glossary ​

availability zone (AZ)

Instances are hosted in multiple locations worldwide. An AZ is a set of isolated locations within a region. A region is a separate geographic area.

Azure Blob Storage (ABS)

Azure service used to allocate permanent storage volumes for Yellowbrick instances.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster

An AKS control plane and a set of nodes that run Kubernetes software. The cluster runs in an account managed by Azure on its own set of Azure virtual machine instances.

bulk loader (ybload)

The client program used for running bulk loads on Yellowbrick tables.

capacity expansion

The process of adding nodes to a cluster.

CloudFormation

AWS service that deploys software stacks for cloud applications, using standard templates and web-based forms.

cluster

Virtual compute cluster, which runs queries and other operations. See compute clusters.

column-level encryption

Automatic encryption of sensitive data loaded into specific columns, as defined in the CREATE TABLE statement.

column store

Persistent columnar storage of table rows in shards on the worker node file systems.

compute cluster

See compute clusters.

compute node

A node in a virtual compute cluster, backed by an appliance blade or cloud-based hardware of a specific instance type.

compute processes

Processes launched on the compute (worker) nodes. In general, Yellowbrick queries use massively parallel processing, with all of the nodes sharing the work. One process on a given node is elected to run the final phase of a given query.

cross-database queries

Queries that reference tables and views in different databases.

data warehouse instance

A deployed and provisioned data warehouse that runs in a cloud environment, typically with limits imposed on its hardware resources.

database

A physical SQL database created in a Yellowbrick Data Warehouse instance.

distribution key

A column in a table that is declared in the CREATE TABLE statement as the key for distributing data evenly among the analytic blades.

DNS zone

Domain Name System (DNS) web service that connects user requests to internet applications running on Azure. A DNS zone assigns a custom domain name in your VPC, and provides access to that domain, making use of internal Azure resources and servers.

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

AWS service used to allocate permanent storage volumes for Yellowbrick instances.

EC2 instance

A virtual server in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the AWS infrastructure.

EKS cluster

An Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) control plane and a set of nodes that run Kubernetes software. The cluster runs in an account managed by AWS on its own set of Amazon EC2 instances.

flex pool

A WLM resource pool with flexible concurrency settings.

flushing

Background operation that periodically moves table rows from the row store to the column store.

object storage

Remote source files supported by ybload and ybunload, such as Azure Blob and AWS S3.

parquet format

Apache Parquet is a binary structured data format that you can load into Yellowbrick tables. Unloads in parquet format are also supported.

PG

PostgreSQL front-end database.

Helm chart

A collection of files that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources, laid out in a specific directory tree and packaged for cloud deployment.

hosted zone

See Route 53 hosted zone and DNS zone.

Kubernetes (K8S)

Open-source software that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

observability stack

The stack that supports Grafana monitoring and logging to an observability bucket for remote diagnostics.

pod

A deployable group of Kubernetes containers, with shared storage and network resources.

profile

In AWS, an account configuration with specific settings for region, role, start URL, and so on.

replicated table

A table that is copied rather than distributed across all of the nodes so that all worker processes have immediate local access to all of its data.

Resource Manager

An Azure service that deploys software stacks for cloud applications, using standard templates and web-based forms.

Route 53 hosted zone

Route 53 is a Domain Name System (DNS) web service, connecting user requests to internet applications running on AWS. A Route 53 zone assigns a custom domain name in your VPC, and provides access to that domain, making use of internal AWS resources and servers.

row store

Temporary storage for results of INSERT INTO...VALUES statements and ybsql \copy operations. Rows are periodically flushed to the column store.

savepoint

A marker within a transaction. Transactions may be rolled back to savepoints.

sort key

A column in a table that is declared in the CREATE TABLE statement as the key for sorting data in the storage system on the analytic blades.

SSL

Secure Sockets Layer, a communications protocol for authenticated and encrypted connections over a network. See TLS.

stored procedure

Executable PL/pgSQL code that combines application logic and SQL constructs to perform actions in the database.

system table

A table in the system catalog that contains persistently stored data (data from log files). System tables describe database objects, storage data, and other metadata.

system view

A view built over one or more system tables or virtual tables. System views are available from the sys schema.

TLS

Transport Layer Security, a communications protocol for authenticated and encrypted connections over a network. The TLS and SSL terms tend to be used interchangeably. SSL/TLS is also used.

virtual compute cluster

See cluster.

virtual table

A table in the system catalog that is dynamically generated based on current activity on the system. These tables capture statistics for queries, CPU and memory utilization, and file system information.

ybdumproles

Yellowbrick client tool that generates DDL for users and roles.

ybdumpschema

Yellowbrick client tool for generating DDL.

ybload

Yellowbrick bulk load client tool.

ybrelay

Client tool that works with Apache Spark to load data from source files that ybload cannot read directly.

ybsql

Yellowbrick SQL client tool.

ybtools

Yellowbrick client tools package, available on several platforms.

ybunload

Yellowbrick client tool for unloading data.