State of a Partition

A file partition has two principal states that determine access to objects in the partition

You can specify a different file-system location for each partition.

A frozen partition can be operationally marked as offline, which means that the file partition cannot be accessed through the file system. The distinction between an online and offline partition is significant when dealing with exception conditions. For example, a reference to an object in an offline partition is a normal condition whereas a reference to a supposedly online partition that is missing is an unexpected or abnormal exception.

System event trapping is one way to allow external management tools to take action to resolve the absent partition condition; the action may be as simple as asking an operator to mount a specified disk from an archive.

The state of a non-active partition overrides the state of objects contained in the partition. The frozen partition state overrides object volatility, which means that all objects contained in a frozen partition are themselves frozen. Similarly, all objects contained in an offline partition are considered to be offline (or not present).

If you attempt to update a frozen object, a 1106 (Cannot update a frozen object) exception is raised. If you attempt to reference an object, by using its object identifier (oid), located in an offline partition, a 12 (Cannot access object in an offline file or offline file partition) exception is raised. If you attempt access to an offline partition other than to read an object, a 3144 (Cannot access an offline file partition) exception is raised.