Overview
This Installation Guide describes installation of Reality on a Windows system.
Before starting the installation or upgrade, ensure that you have the necessary prerequisites and information you must supply.
If upgrading, read Upgrading from an Earlier Release.
Product overview
Reality is a software environment that supports multiple databases on a UNIX or Windows host. For information about the extensive capabilities of the Reality database management system, see the Reality Reference documentation.
Resilience
Transaction Handling is a feature that maintains the consistency of the database by keeping defined transactions (sets of updates) intact. Rapid Recovery File System, Transaction Logging, Shadow Database, and FailSafe are features offering further levels of resilience. Transaction Logging and Rapid Recovery require a single 'raw log' to be configured for each Reality version that is being run at the same time. Further resilience features require at least one clean log per database to be configured. Minimum configuration is described in this guide, with additional information in the Resilience reference documentation.
Networking
Comprehensive communications facilities enable communications between a Reality database environment and another Reality database, or a host system environment (UNIX or Windows).
User documentation
Reality is supplied with comprehensive Online Documentation that you can view in a Web browser.
How to use the contents of the ISO Image/DVD for installation
The Reality ISO Image/DVD delivery must always be either burnt to a physical DVD or mounted as a virtual ISO image. The file structures must not be copied and then accessed from a Host Platform file system, as this can lead to issues with the operation of Reality either during or post installation, or when loading future updates.
This release contains the PDS History Tool, Reality, the Online Documentation and all of the Reality external components. See the Reality Release Information for details.
The PDS History Tool must always be installed first and will be installed automatically if not already present.
For a description of how to install the external components and the Reality remote tape server, please refer to the Reality External Components Installation Guide.