Configuration planning for 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.
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 that uses a data store is created on a single server, it is configured to use an Apache Derby 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.

Database topology
- 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. You might want to conduct your own performance analysis, because the performance characteristics can be very sensitive to the hardware specification.
- Decide whether the data store will have a dedicated database, or share a database with other data stores.
- Consider the implications for high availability of your choice of topology.
Automatic creation of database tables
- WebSphere Application Server 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, you must first ensure that WebSphere Application Server has sufficient authority
to create tables and indexes by setting up the required privileges
for your chosen database.DB2 for z/OS restriction: The option for WebSphere Application Server to create the tables is not available with DB2® for z/OS®. If you use DB2 for z/OS, your database administrator must create the data store tables manually.
- To enable the database administrator to create the tables manually, you must provide data definition language (DDL) statements created by using the sibDDLGenerator command.
Amount of BLOB space required to hold message data
Message data is stored in a database table column of datatype BLOB. Before you create a data store, you must consider the size of your expected workload to ensure that your database administrator creates a sufficiently large BLOB space to hold your message data.