General Communication Facility
Ingres Net works with the basic Ingres or Vectorwise components to enable connectivity between client and server instances. It also uses the General Communication Facility to manage communication among various components of Ingres.
The General Communication Facility (GCF) manages communication among all the components of Ingres. The GCF consists of five parts:
• The General Communications Architecture (GCA), which provides communication connections between Ingres processes on the same instance.
• The Name Server (iigcn) maintains a list of all registered, active servers. The Name Server provides information to user processes that enables a connection to a local DBMS Server. When a process wants to connect to a remote DBMS Server, the Name Server provides information that allows the process to first connect to a Communications Server. The Communications Server establishes communication with the remote DBMS Server. An instance has only one Name Server process.
• The Communications Server (iigcc) is the main process component of Ingres Net. It monitors outgoing communication from local applications to remote DBMS servers and incoming communication from remote applications to local DBMS servers. An instance can have multiple Communications server processes.
• The Data Access Server (iigcd) translates requests from the Ingres or Vectorwise JDBC Driver and the .NET Data Provider into Ingres or Vectorwise internal format and forwards the request to the appropriate DBMS Server. The Data Access Server (DAS) accesses DBMS servers on remote machines using Net.
• The Protocol Bridge Server (iigcb) provides services for Ingres Bridge, a product that enables a client application running on one type of local area network to access a DBMS server running on a different type of network. Ingres Bridge “bridges” a client using one network protocol to a server using another. (This component is functional only if you are using Ingres Bridge.)