Use this task to plan the configuration of
a messaging engine to use a data store.
Why and when to perform this task
Before you configure a
messaging engine,
consider the following steps:
Steps for this task
- Choose the relational database management system (RDBMS) for the data store. You might
want to choose the RDBMS that you use for other applications, particularly
if you are already familiar with the tools you use for managing that RDBMS.
You might also want to consider the following criteria:
- Performance
- Scalability
- Availability, especially if you are running messaging engines in
a high availability environment
When
a new messaging engine which uses
a data store is created on
a single server, it is configured to use a Cloudscape data source by default.
This enables the messaging engine to
run without needing any additional configuration.
The default embedded Derby data source is sufficient for many purposes. Other
relational database management systems offer more comprehensive tooling and
improved performance, particularly scalability on larger machines with more
than two processors.
- Choose your database topology. 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. You might want to conduct your own performance
analysis, because the performance characteristics can be very sensitive to
the hardware specification.
- Consider whether you want WebSphere Application Server to
create the data store tables
automatically or whether you want your database administrator to create the
tables beforehand. For more information, refer to Creating the tables.
- Message data is stored in a database table column of datatype BLOB.
Before you create a datastore, you must consider the size of your expected
workload to ensure that your database administrator creates a sufficiently
large enough BLOB space to hold your message data.