Oracle Database Maintenance

The following recommendations can help you maintain your Oracle database for best performance.

Use Oracle's extensive Backup and Restore capabilities to maintain the CA Harvest SCM database. CA Harvest SCM stores repositories in the database (previous releases of CA Harvest SCM stored them on disk); therefore, a database backup includes repositories. Version data is stored as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) in the Oracle database. For performance reasons, logging is turned off for the BLOB columns. Shut down CA Harvest SCM before performing an online physical backup. Terminating the broker shuts down the server processes.
If CA Harvest SCM must be available continuously for configuration item updates, consider logging BLOB column changes.
The following SQL commands turn on logging for the BLOB columns:
```
ALTER TABLE HARVERSIONDATA 
MODIFY LOB (VERSIONDATA ) 
( NOCACHE LOGGING );
ALTER TABLE HARVERSIONDELTA 
MODIFY LOB (VERSIONDELTA ) 
( NOCACHE LOGGING );
```
Logging VERSIONDATA can downgrade the performance for check-in and load repository items.

Logging VERSIONDELTA can downgrade the performance of the list version process.

If you do not want to log BLOB column changes, use the Oracle Export utility to make a logical backup of the CA Harvest SCM data.

Note: Use this information as a guide. For complete instructions about maintaining your Oracle database, see your Oracle documentation.