Platform Deployment Guide › Data Warehouse › Data Warehouse Requirements

Data Warehouse Requirements

This section lists the general requirements and considerations for the CA Data Protection data warehouse.

CMS Database Accounts

You can enable the data warehouse when you install the CMS. When you enable the data warehouse, you must supply credentials for two accounts for the CMS database.

Reporting User

External reporting applications (such as BusinessObjects Enterprise) use this database account to connect to the Data Warehouse and CMS database.

This database account inherits the security model of the CA Data Protection user who is running the report. For example, if the user running the report has been assigned to the Management Group security model, then the report results are also subject to RLS restrictions based on the user’s management group. Conversely, if the user has been assigned to the Unrestricted security model, the report results are not subject to any RLS restrictions.

Unrestricted Search User

This database account corresponds to the 'Unrestricted' security model. CA Data Protection consoles and external reporting tools can use this database account when searching the CA Data Protection Data Warehouse and CMS database for events. Unlike normal Search User database accounts, the Unrestricted Search User is not subject to row level security (RLS) when searching the database. If a reviewer has 'Unrestricted' security model, the reviewer can see any events when they run a search or report. Search results or reports are not restricted by policy class or the reviewer’s management group.

This account is useful if, for example, an external auditor requires unrestricted (view-only) access to captured events in your CMS database.

Size Considerations

Installing the data warehouse tables can increase the size of the existing CMS database by up to 50%. Therefore, ensure you have sufficient disk space for the volume of data that you want to keep in the data warehouse. To ensure sufficient disk space, you may need to modify the default settings for data warehousing jobs to prevent the data warehouse growing excessively.

Competition for Memory, CPU and Disk Resources on the CMS Host Server

The data warehouse tables are stored in the CMS database. Consequently, any memory, CPU and disk resources consumed by data warehouse queries are not available to the CMS database and can result in performance issues. For example, large sort or join operations and increased buffer cache requirements can exert pressure on memory resources. Likewise, insufficient CPU threads can exert pressure on the CPU and overloaded disks can increase disk response times.

We therefore recommend that you set up low impact monitoring of these resources on the CMS host server to detect any performance issues.

Also, configuration changes on the host server may ease some performance issues. For example, you can add more memory or increase the number of CPUs. You can also reduce CPU parallelism. You can uninstall other applications from the host server. You can spread the disk workload or isolate different types of disk activity.

Whatever configuration changes you make, we recommend that investigate the performance issue first to identify the genuine cause. Sometimes, the symptoms of a problem may obscure the underlying cause. For example, a memory shortage may result in a very small buffer cache, in turn causing an excessive number of physical disks reads.