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Administration & Configuration
Administrative tasks
  Daily tasks
    Prune the data warehouse
    Process the OLAP cubes
  As needed tasks
    Size the data warehouse
    Grant access rights
    Prune isolated region data
    Delete a user-defined field
Process Analyzer Engine Configuration Tool
Process Analyzer Client Configuration Tool
Other information
   

Size the data warehouse

Use the following information to plan for sufficient storage capacity for the Process Analyzer Engine to use.

Method for sizing the database

The Process Analyzer uses three separate data storage entities: the data warehouse, the data mart, and the OLAP cubes.

Data warehouse

The set of data that are collected and stored in the data warehouse are the workflow events, process, configuration, and resource data. The configuration, process, and resource do not consume much space—they reach a plateau then the volume of new data increases at a very slow rate. On the other hand, the events generate a large volume of data. An event is generated when a workflow is created or terminated, and multiple events are generated during the processing of the steps of the workflow.

The majority of the generated events are information about workflow step activities. For instance, over the life cycle of a step, the Process Engine generates a minimum of three events: one event to queue the work object at a particular step, one to lock the work object, and one to dispatch the work object after it has been completed. More events may be generated, depending on the number of times that a work object is locked, unlocked, reassigned, or delegated. Since the events generate the most significant amount of data, the best way to estimate the size the database is based on the expected number of processed workflow steps—the number of processed workflow steps translates relatively well to the number of events that are generated and stored in the data warehouse.

The Process Analyzer data warehouse is named VMAEDW.

 

Data mart As the VMAE Publishing Service processes the data warehouse, it generates and stores facts in the various fact tables in the data mart. The Publishing service also imports process, configuration, and user information from the data warehouse into the data mart. The majority of the data that are stored in the data mart are facts. This is because facts are generated from the events and, as mentioned in the previous section, the events are the majority of the data that are collected in the data warehouse. Since the number of facts in the data mart is relative to the number of events stored in the data warehouse, it is logical to size the data mart by the number of workflow steps.

The Process Analyzer data mart is named VMAEDm.

 

OLAP cubes The space used by the OLAP cubes is very small in comparison to the data warehouse and the data mart, so you will not be concerned with its storage capacity. The final formula for calculating storage space requirement should be roughly sufficient for storing the data warehouse, data mart, and the OLAP cubes as well.

The Process Analyzer data warehouse is named VMAE[_instance_name], where instance_name is the name of a named instance of the Process Analyzer database. (The name of a default instance of the database is simply VMAE.)

Formula for Calculating Storage Space Requirements

You can use the following formula to calculate the storage space requirements for the Process Analyzer Engine database based on the expected number of processed steps:

Storage space = (total number of expected workflow steps processed over time) * 1.5kb

If user-defined fields are included then the storage space requirement is:

Storage space = (total number of expected workflow steps processed over time) * 1.5 kb + [(total number of user defined fields * total number of expected workflow steps processed over time) * 0.6kb]

An example calculation

For an installation that processes 250,000 steps a day continuously for 365 days a year, the total number of processed steps is 91,250,000. The total storage space needed is 137 gigabytes.

If ten user-defined fields are added, the storage space requirement is 684 gigabytes.

Pruning the data warehouse and its effect on storage space requirements

Pruning the data warehouse and the data mart has significant affect on storage space demand. See Pruning the Process Analyzer database.