VSTs are called
virtual tables for a reason, they have no physical record.
VST tables don't use the regular table storage mechanisms, VST data is not stored anywhere, they have no physical record.
When querying a VST, records are created “on run time” when retrieved. The database engine will invoke a dedicated function to pull data directly out of it's internal shared memory structures (in whatever arbitrary format they currently have) and reformat that data into the record storage format. This makes the data available to the client, so that the client can process them as if they were database records to describe current database status and activity.
The structures the data gets pulled from are mostly fixed-size lists, sized based on database startup parameters. Example:
- -n determines number of slots available to _connect; -L sizes _Lock;
- The Transaction table is the comprised of -Mn -n -L -maxids
- VST Queries that return records that show as all unknown "?" values are the slots in the internal memory structure which currently aren't used. In releases prior to OpenEdge 11.5, unknown "?" values in _Lock (in 11.5 a change was made to filter them out).
When running a VST query, while it may look a regular table, what you really see depends on how the database engine manages it's internals, and anything that the storage manager would take care of (including indexing, sorting etc.) is not guaranteed to work the way you'd expect - that really depends on how the dedicated function supporting a particular VST is implemented.
Example: When the function underlying the VST doesn't do any sorting on the values, a FOR FIRST will just grab whatever record is the first to satisfy the WHERE clause, and the BY clause ends up simply being ignored.
As a general guideline use a NO-LOCK VST query with a simple WHERE clause which takes a snapshot, then store that information in a temp-table. You can then analyse the data from that temp-table at it's own pace, with proper indexing/sorting guaranteed and without having to consider further that the contents of these VSTs can be highly volatile.
