System Description

System Description

Figure 1. Vine System

Vine Open Server

Vine Open Server is the main repository of all Vine data. It is a conventional SQL relational database running under the Oracle DBMS.

During the installation, which is done using a separate client application Vine Server Setup, a new tablespace and the "VineyardDB" user are created. The VineyardDB schema contains all necessary tables, stored procedures and packages. No executable programs or services are installed on the server side.

After the installation, the Vine administrator creates accounts for all users who are authorized to use the database. For a database connection, a Vine database user will need to enter the personal username and password. Further user authorization includes distributing users among groups with different access levels.

Vine Concepts

Objects

The Vine database is organized around its primary logical elements - objects, which store information valuable to the user. The objects represent different kinds of data, for instance, the standard Vine object types are: companies, persons, projects, events, documents, collections, resources, Web links, and maps.

Vine client products retrieve object data from the database tables and show it to the user in an accessible form. This is how Vine displays a company:

Figure 2. An object displayed by Vine

Each Vine object type is represented in the Vine database by a separate table. It is possible to have different objects of the same type (for example, companies having different sets of fields) in one table available to different users. You can find more information about this in the Overview Vine Server Database chapter and in the Import Packages section of the SQL API chapter.

Object Connections

Objects are linked to each other by Connections.

Connections are almost as important as objects since they define relations between objects and bring the needed order into the data. Each connection links a pair of objects.

When a Vine client product displays an object it also analyzes the object's connections and shows the connected objects.

All database connections are stored in one table. Each stored connection has a link to another table which stores the types of connections.

Object Parameters

An Object Parameter is an object's special characteristic. The user assigns it to an object by choosing the parameter's value from a given set of choices. This way the user relates the object to a distinct category within the object's type. The functionality of different Vine tools relies on this additional classification. For instance, in Vine a project is, by default, shown in the To-Do list only if its 'Phase' parameter has the 'Active' value.

There is a separate table for each parameter type. A parameter table stores a set of values for that parameter. In an object, only a link to the chosen parameter value is stored.