User’s responsibility

Defining tables groups content

Defining the content of tables group is essential to guarantee the database integrity. It is the E-Maj administrator’s responsibility to ensure that all tables updated by a given operation are really included in a single tables group.

Appropriate call of main functions

The emaj_start_group(), emaj_stop_group(), emaj_set_mark_group(), emaj_rollback_group() and emaj_logged_rollback_group() functions (and their related multi-groups functions) set explicit locks on tables of the group to be sure that no transactions updating these tables are running at the same time. But it is the user’s responsibility to execute these operations “at the right time”, i.e. at moments that really correspond to a stable point in the life of these tables. He must also take care of warning messages that may be reported by E-Maj rollback functions.

Management of application triggers

Triggers may have been created on application tables. It is not rare that these triggers perform one or more updates on other tables. In such a case, it is the E-Maj administrator’s responsibility to understand the impact of rollback operations on tables concerned by triggers, and if needed, to take the appropriate measures.

If the trigger simply adjusts the content of the row to insert or update, the logged data will contain the final value of columns. So the rollback would reset the old values without any problem. But may be it would be necessary to deactivate such a trigger during a rollback operation.

If the trigger updates another table, two cases must be considered:

• if the updated table belong to the same tables group, it would be necessary to deactivate the trigger during a rollback operation, so that E-Maj and only E-Maj performs the updates required by the rollback operation,
• if the updated table does not belong to the same tables group, it is essential to analyse the consequences of a rollback operation, in order to avoid a de-synchronisation between both tables. In such a case, merely deactivating the trigger may not be sufficient.

Internal E-Maj table or sequence change

With the rights they have been granted, emaj_adm roles and superusers can update any E-Maj internal table.

Caution

But in practice, only two tables may be updated by these users: emaj_group_def and emaj_param. Any other internal table or sequence update my lead to data corruption during rollback operations.