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.
Supported configurations: WebSphere® Application Server supports direct
customer use of the Apache Derby database in
test environments
only. The product does not support direct customer use of Apache Derby
database in
production environments. The product supports the
use of Apache Derby only by internal application server componentsf
in production environments.
sptcfg
Database topology
You must consider several
options when selecting the relative location of a data store and its
messaging engine:
- 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.
Automatic creation of database tables
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:
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.