You use the governor to monitor and change the behavior of applications that run against a database.
The governor consists of two parts:
When you start the governor, you issue a start command from the governor front-end utility, which then starts the governor daemon. By default, a daemon is started on every partition in a partitioned database, but you can also use the front-end utility to start a single daemon at a specific partition to monitor the activity against the database partition found there. Or, a daemon can monitor the activity on a single-partition database. See "Starting and Stopping the Governor" for details.
Each governor daemon collects statistics about the applications running against a database. It then checks these statistics against the rules that you specified in a governor configuration file that applies to that specific database. (See "Creating the Governor Configuration File" for details.) The governor then acts according to these rules. For example, a rule may indicate that an application is using too much resource. In this situation, the governor may change the application's priority or force it off the database, according to the instructions you specified in the governor configuration file.
If the action associated with a rule is to change the application's priority, the governor changes the priority of agents on the database partition on which the governor detected the resource violation. If the action associated with a rule is to force an application, the application is forced even if the governor that detected the resource violation is running on the application's coordinator node or in a partitioned database environment.
The governor also logs any actions that it takes. You can query the log files to review the actions that the governor has taken. For details, see "Governor Log Files" and "Querying Governor Log Files".