Reference
This is the reference tier: the precise, interface-by-interface answer to "how do I connect to, script, and operate System9?", separate from the concept and how-to tiers, and honest about what is live today versus planned.
Everything here resolves to the same governed substrate described in Platform Architecture. A connection over a wire protocol, a REST call, an agent tool, and a console click all pass through one identity model and one policy plane. There is no second, unpoliced door.
What's in the reference tier
| Section | What you get |
|---|---|
| Interfaces & APIs | Every externally-reachable interface: the PostgreSQL wire protocol, Arrow Flight SQL, open table formats (Delta Sharing, Iceberg), REST/OpenAPI, the ontology SDKs, and the s9 CLI: with its direction, ports, client compatibility, and status. |
| Platform services | Moved. The runtime decomposition of a cell, the nine services, their ports and their failure domains, now lives under Platform Architecture where the rest of the shape is described. |
| Roles and permissions | The permission catalog and the built-in roles: three permission planes, 443 permissions across four risk tiers, the 48 roles that ship and what each is for, the scope a grant attaches at, cross-plane projection, and the second authorization layer object storage adds. |
| Supported file types | Every format the platform identifies and every format it extracts text and structure from, the difference between the two, and the limits: OCR engine dependency, archive recursion depth, the per-document size cap, and where audio and video stand. |
| Configurable workers (operational) | The background workers a cell runs, how each is declared, gated by a governed capability, and configured per deployment corner. |
Nothing in this product is graded, certified, or deployed. A reference page describes a mechanism and states its status, live, partial (named slice), or planned, and never says certified, validated, partnered, or production-grade. Where an interface only works for part of what its name implies, the page names the slice. A green health check is never evidence that an interface carries data end to end, and we never quote a connector count. When in doubt, the page underclaims.
How the interfaces relate
Figure: every interface resolves through one gate and one governed plan. The protocol changes; the governance does not. Two callers with different clearances see different rows and masked columns from the same query, because policy is compiled into the plan rather than layered onto the tool.
Related
- Interoperability, the wider "connect what you already own" story, in both directions.
- How-to · Connect a BI tool, task-oriented steps for pointing a reporting tool at a cell.
- Edge command reference, the full
s9command families, family by family.