Database API
This section of the guide describes a set of SQL views, or virtual tables, that constitute the database application programming interface (API). These views are provided to enable your applications to query the database directly by using MSSQL-compatible interfaces such as ADO or ODBC. A typical application might be a Perl cgi program that creates an HTML report for online viewing. Perl uses the database Interface (dbi) to connect to the SQL database. Any programming language that has an ODBC interface can be used to access the database.
The SQL format of the database makes it easy to create various views of the tables, including Fixlet, action, computer, and retrieved property tables. With a few simple SELECT commands, you can create filtered and sorted views of the various databases. These can be used to prepare custom reports, audit trails or capture snapshots of the environment.
The database API provides backwards compatibility across releases: applications written against them should continue to work in later releases of Tivoli BigFix unless product functionality or underlying content changes in a way that renders these views inapplicable. In this guide, there are references to BigFix Enterprise Suite, or BES. This refers to what we now call Tivoli BigFix, and is a legacy of previous releases.
Access to the database for the SELECT commands listed here is granted to all authorized users of the Console. Because these views are intended for output only, users are not able to update, delete, or otherwise modify the database with this API. For information about how to create actions and tasks that might modify the database, see the section of this guide titled Platform API.
The following sections describe the views that are supplied to support the SQL Database API.