Plan the configuration of a messaging engine to use a data store

You must consider a number of choices before you configure a messaging engine to use a data store.

  1. Choose the relational database management system (RDBMS) for the data store.

    Criteria:

    • Performance
    • Scalability
    • Availability

    WebSphere Application Server supports direct customer use of the Apache Derby database in test environments only. WAS ND v7.0 does not support direct customer use of Apache Derby database in production environments.

  2. Choose the database topology:

    1. Decide whether the data store will run on the same node as its messaging engine, or on a remote node.

      In some cases, running the data store on a remote node can improve performance. In other cases, a local database provides performance equivalent to a remote database. Conduct your own performance analysis, because the performance characteristics can be very sensitive to the hardware specification.

    2. Decide whether the data store will have a dedicated database, or share a database with other data stores.

    3. Consider the implications for high availability of the choice of topology.

  3. Consider whether you want WAS to create the data store tables automatically or whether you want the database administrator to create the tables beforehand.

    • WAS can create the data store tables automatically if you select the Create tables option when you configure the data store to use a data source.

      If you want to choose this option, first ensure that WAS has sufficient authority to create tables and indexes.

      DB2 for z/OS restriction: The option for WAS to create the tables is not available with DB2 for z/OS. If you use DB2 for z/OS, the database administrator must create the data store tables manually.

    • To enable the database administrator to create the tables manually, provide data definition language (DDL) statements created by using the sibDDLGenerator command.

  4. Consider the amount of BLOB space required to hold the message data. Message data is stored in a database table column of datatype BLOB. Before you create a data store, consider the size of the expected workload to ensure that the database administrator creates a sufficiently large BLOB space to hold the message data.
   

Last updated Dec 15, 2010 8:14:22 PM CST