Database planning

When planning the databases to use with IBM® Mobile Portal Accelerator, consider the following information.

You must use either DB2® Universal Database, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, or Microsoft SQL Server as your database software. For details about supported releases of the database products, refer to the topic on hardware and software requirements. For detailed planning and installation information, refer to the documentation for your database software.

Mobile Portal Accelerator uses two types of databases:

Databases used by WebSphere® Portal.
As you plan the use of these databases, consider the following factors.
- Do not use Derby as a production database with Mobile Portal Accelerator. Although WebSphere Portal supports the Derby database software, Derby is not supported as a production database with Mobile Portal Accelerator.
- IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator adds a table to the WebSphere Portal database for tracking preload notice usage on a per user basis.
- Mobile Portal Accelerator version 8.0 supports a config split environment, in which database domains are shared between separate portal instances on a single server or on a WebSphere Portal cluster. Preload notice data can be stored in a central community database.
See the WebSphere Portal product documentation for more details on planning for these databases.
Multi-Channel Server (MCS) database.
This database is also known as the policy repository database. It contains the device attributes for each supported device and the layout, theme, and component policies that are created with Mobile Portal Toolkit.

The MCS database can be created on the same database server WebSphere Portal or it can be on a separate database server. Multi-Channel Server software uses either the DB2 network driver or Oracle thin client driver by default. Microsoft SQL Server is also supported. However, for a production environment, MCS must be configured to use a data source managed by WebSphere Application Server.
The total size for the MCS database depends on the following factors:
- Database software used and how it is configured
- Number of devices in the repository
- Number of device-specific layout policies
- Number of device-specific theme policies
- Number of components and asset policies

By default, depending on which database you are using, reserve the following space for the MCS database:

DB2: minimum of 500 MB
Oracle: minimum of 1500 MB
Microsoft SQL Server: minimum of 100 MB

Several hundred new layouts and themes of average complexity would not typically increase the total size requirement beyond a few MB.

The number of component and asset policies can vary depending on the requirements and whether registered assets handle images. However, in MCS, asset policies are metadata about actual resources. The size of each asset depends largely on the length of the URL used to see the actual resource. The size of an asset policy is typically on the order of a few hundred bytes.