Xam

Xam may refer to:

ǀXam language

ǀXam (/Kham) (English pronunciation: /ˈkɑːm/), or ǀXam Kaǃkʼe, is an extinct Khoisan language of South Africa, part of the ǃkwi language group. It is closely related to the moribund Nǁng language.

ǀXam was used for the South African motto adopted on 27 April 2000,

being diverse people unite or, on a collective scale, Unity in Diversity. However, it is not known if that phrase would have been idiomatic in ǀXam. Because it is extinct, ǀXam is not one of the eleven official languages of South Africa.

The pipe at the beginning of the name "ǀXam" represents a dental click, like the English interjection tsk, tsk! used to express pity or shame. The ⟨x⟩ denotes a voiceless velar fricative. There is little variation in rendering the name, compared to other Khoisan languages. Besides the simple orthographic variant ǀKham, there is a different grammatical form, ǀKhuai

Much of the scholarly work on the ǀXam language was performed by Wilhelm Bleek, a German linguist of the 19th century. He had studied a variety of ǀXam spoken at Achterveld, and (with Lucy Lloyd) another spoken at Strandberg and Katkop.

XAM

XAM, or the eXtensible Access Method, is a storage standard developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). It is in the process of being ratified as an ANSI standard. XAM is an API for fixed content aware storage devices. XAM replaces the various proprietary interfaces that have been used for this purpose in the past. Content generating applications now have a standard means of saving and finding their content across a broad array of storage devices.

XAM is similar in function to a file system API such as the POSIX file and directory operations, in that it allows applications to store and retrieve their data. XAM stores application data in XSet objects that also contain metadata.

Basic concepts

The standard XAM API consists of all of the three primary objects and two secondary objects that an application can manipulate to store and retrieve data.

The first primary object that applications deal with to store and retrieve data is called an Xset. It is the object that is the container for both the data and the associated metadata. XSet metadata goes beyond the typical system metadata, and adds fields for retention and other data management policies. Applications can also add their own user metadata as well. This is a key requirement in the fixed content storage market. Any of the metadata in the XSet can be queried for later, in order to find the XSet.