Metadata about All Tables

Tables do not themselves have names or other attributes. However, we may add some special ``system tables'' to be used by Cactus itself to store this sort of information for those cases where it's needed. For example, we may add support for a ``checkpoint me'' bit in a table's flags word, so that if you want a table to be checkpointed, you just need to set this bit. In this case, the table will probably get a system generated name in the checkpoint dump file. But if you want the table to have some other name in the dump file, then you need to tell the checkpointing code that, by setting an appropriate entry in a checkpoint table. (You would find the checkpoint table by looking in a special ``master system table'' that records handles of other interesting tables.)

Infrastructure Thorn Writer's Guide 43#43 44#44