Operating the DWH

Introduction

The ConSol CM Reporting Framework (CMRF) and Data Warehouse (DWH) are the modules which are required to provide the basis for Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting in ConSol CM. Please see System architecture for an overview of the required components. The use of the DWH has several advantages, most importantly, that you avoid performance decreases because you do not need to use the production database for reporting, and that the database schema and table structure are optimized for reporting queries.

The installation and setup of the CMRF and DWH is described in the ConSol CM Setup Manual. You can find detailed information about the administration of the DWH in the ConSol CM Administrator Manual.

The current manual contains information about the technical background of the synchronisation, see Synchronization mechanism and Synchronization procedures, and a section about troubleshooting, see FAQs and tips for troubleshooting.

Required components

The ConSol CM database and the DWH are two separate databases or database schemes. The CMRF is responsible for transferring the data.

The following components are required to operate ConSol CM with a DWH:

• ConSol CM server is running and writes write data into the ConSol CM database.
• The CMRF is running and has access to both the CM and the DWH database.
• The DWH mode is set to Admin or Live mode. The mode determines the handling of DWH updates and tasks, see Open DWH tasks.

Open DWH tasks

Open DWH tasks are saved in the cmas_dwh_task table of the ConSol CM database. You can view and execute them on the Tasks page of the DWH menu in the Web Admin Suite.

Tasks are created for configuration changes, e.g. setting Transfer to DWH to true for an entity (data field or relation), or creating a new cube. If the DWH runs in LIVE mode and the checkbox Administrative changes are applied automatically is selected on the Tasks page, the tasks are executed automatically. Otherwise, you need to start them manually on the Tasks page. This setting is also saved in the ConSol CM system property cmas-dwh-server, autocommit.cf.changes.

Monitoring

You can see the status of the DWH on the Monitor page in the Web Admin Suite. In addition, the log files and some tables contain useful information:

• hlp_parameter (DWH table): dwh_status indicates the status, which should be 4, see Tables in the DWH database for details.

• int_parameter (DWH table): last-success-live-id indicates the epoch time stamp in milliseconds of the last successful live update of a transfer or update operation.

• cmas_dwh_synchronization (CM table): dwh_status indicates the status on the ConSol CM side, cmrf_status indicates the status on the DWH side, see Synchronization procedures for details.

Log files

The DWH-specific log messages are written to the cmrf.log file. There are several ways to access it:

• Open it on the file system:

  <JBOSS_HOME>/standalone/log/cmrf.log

• View or download it on the Log files page of the Web Admin Suite.

• View log entries which refer to specific DWH operations by clicking the View log button of the operation on the Administration page of the DWH menu in the Web Admin Suite.

In addition, server.log file entries related to dwh-transfer-service, dwh-live-service, dwh-log-service are relevant for the DWH.

See Log files for details about configuring the logging.