Make sure your databases are ready before you install or upgrade Jive.
Prerequisites
To install Jive, you'll need to set up
three databases: one each for the core application, the Activity Engine, and Analytics. (While
it's possible to run Jive
without Analytics, any substantial installation needs to include it.) You'll find that an
installation or upgrade goes more smoothly if you complete the database-related tasks first.
For new installations, the database and application users must be created before installation.
Follow recommended best practices for the database vendor and version selected. See the
database-specific best practices below for information about how to configure your database to
work with Jive.
Database Administration
We highly recommend having a skilled database administrator in charge of your Jive databases.
Locating Your Databases on Separate Servers
For large installations, it is recommended that the core application database, the Activity Engine database, and the Analytics database be hosted on separate database engines. At a minimum, disk and memory resources should be isolated for each service.
Why Separate the Core Application and Analytics Databases?
The following points explain why it's especially important for your Analytics database to
be separate from the application database. Ideally, they should be stored on two separate
servers. While we technically support storing the Analytics and application databases on one
server, here's why it's important to ensure isolation:
- Analytics has a very different access pattern from the application database: many
streaming writes, occasional reads, and busy activity once a day when the ETL runs.
- The storage requirements for Analytics are very different from the application
database requirements. The physical size of the Analytics databases will grow much
larger than the application database on busy systems. The IO profiles (the application
database is a typical OLTP load, the Analytics database is OLAP) and the usage profiles
(potentially large result sets, aggregates and ad-hoc queries are expected on the
Analytics database) also support isolation of the application and analytics resources.
- The application database is more critical than the Analytics database. Therefore, the
analytics database should not be in a position to demand resources that the core
database may need.
- The Analytics database is intended to be accessed by users running ad-hoc queries.
Because the application cannot predict which queries users may run, it is possible that
a bad query could execute and thus consume all of the server's capacity.
Storing Attachments
You should always configure attachments for storage
using a file system provider rather than the database. Storing attachments in the database is
possible, but is known to cause severe performance issues when the document store gets large
and contends with the database cache. For more information about how to set up your file
system storage, see
Required External Components and
Configuring a Binary Storage Provider.
Database Collation
The database or database instance must be configured
for UTF8 collation. See the instructions for your individual database platform for
instructions.