Distributed system has a number of object types.

Managed objects are objects managed by the Postgres Pro Shardman cluster. Instances of these objects are present on all nodes.

Distributed objects are instances of the managed objects that are present on all cluster shards. The basic values of these objects are identical on all shards, however some values can be shard-specific, e.g. sequence interval. They can be created directly by a user with CREATE TABLE with (distributed by) or automatically generated by the system (primary keys or indexes). User can modify these objects.

Internal objects are objects created automatically when a distributed object is created. These are system objects (e.g. partitions of a sharded table) and they cannot be edited by user directly, only via the parent distributed object.

Unmanaged objects are object instances that are present only on a specific shard and are not managed by the Postgres Pro Shardman cluster.

Regular objects are other objects from PostgreSQL or Postgres Pro with no distributed features. Note that Postgres Pro Shardman does not use them in any cross-shard transactions. They can be used as a temporary solution throughout the migration from a non-distributed system.