Databases and user tables

On a new IBM® Netezza® system, there is typically one main database, system, and a database template, master_db. Netezza uses the master_db as a template for all other user databases that are created on the system. In the Netezza design, the terms database and catalog are synonyms. Netezza uses the term database to define a collection of entities such as schemas, tables, views, synonyms, and other objects.

Initially, only the admin user can create databases, but the admin user can grant other users permission to create databases as described in Security and access control You cannot delete the system database. The admin user can also make another user the owner of a database, which gives that user admin-like control over that database and its contents.

The database creator becomes the default owner of the database. The owner can remove the database and all its objects, even if other users own objects within the database.

Starting in Release 7.0.3, Netezza supports the ability to define multiple schemas within each database. You can use schemas to organize the objects, as well as to give users areas within the database for development and testing. For example, within the database Prod, you could have different schemas for different users, where they can define different objects such as tables, views, and so on. Each schema has an owner, who has full privileges to all objects in the schema. Users can be granted access to schemas of the database, and they can view or manage objects in that schema, but they will not see or be able to manage objects in other schemas unless they are explicitly granted privileges to that schema and its objects. In addition, schemas allow you to reuse object names. For example, you could have a table tab1 in schema1 and table tab1 in schema2. Although they share the same name, those two tab1 tables are different tables.