Database maintenance

Amazon FinSpace Managed kdb allows you to perform schema changes to your database like adding a new column, updating a column type, and renaming columns, etc. You can perform the database maintenance operations by creating a general purpose cluster with a writable dataview. A writable dataview allows you to make updates to your kdb database locally on a cluster. To avoid caching the whole kdb database on a cluster, you can enable on-demand caching for your dataview segments. The dataview will only load the filesystem metadata of your database files for the segments with on-demand caching and loads the actual file content as they are accessed by a database maintenance operation.

You can implement a database maintenance script and run it as an initialization script. An initialization script can run for multiple hours without being interrupted, which is required for long-running database maintenance tasks. When database maintenance script is running, monitor the cluster logs for progress and any errors. After the database maintenance script completes, connect to the cluster to verify the updated kdb database and commit changes by using the commit_kx_database q API. The API creates a changeset and returns the changeset id, which you can use to monitor the changeset status through either the FinSpace API or console. You can also automate verification and commit steps in your database maintenance script itself. For more information, see the following sections.