Separate Planning Store

[topedgemonk]

We are moving from EP10.1 to 10.1.1FP2. We have had content store and planning store in same schema, but then there is an option of keeping content store and planning store in separate schemas.

Have you noticed any advantages of keeping separate schemas for content store and planning store?

We use Oracle 10g and run about 25 apps on the environment.

[ericlfg]

Hey,

The advantage of a separate planning store really comes into play if you need to do a restore of either the CS or the PS, easily, without hacking tables in one or the other (not recommended, ever).

Example:
Let's say you have corruption in the CS, which forces you to have to restore a previous version from a couple weeks or a few days earlier.  If you have the PS in the same schema as the CS, then any changes to macros, admin links (newly created, modified, etc), or added / removed applications would be lost within that time frame. 

It's always a best practice to keep both schemas / users separate as it gives you finer control over disaster recovery operations out of the box.  You could always use other backup methods (running a deployment from the CAC) to routinely backup all applications, macros, admin links, etc; however, it's not as fluid.

[topedgemonk]

Thanks ericlfg. That makes a lot of sense.

If I do have a separate planning store, would publishes be executed at the database level as the content store user or as the planning store user? Reason I ask is because of extra privileges which needs to be granted for the DB user to truncate all tables before a full refresh during publish.

Sorry, one more question (and hopefully I don't make this one too
confusing)
- I did try setting up content store and planning store on two separate schemas.When setting up CAC, it refused to accept the credentials of the planning store, so I gave credentials of the content store. When one opens CAC, you see the 'Planning Store' on top in the left pane right above access rights and system settings. Here it displays the content store name. i.e, if content store is ABC, it displays 'PlanningStore:ABC' in CAC.

In Cognos configuration, I have set up planning store and content store as two different schemas.

Would the behaviour in CAC indicate that my attempt to set up planning store and content store have been futile?

[ericlfg]

When you say publishes, are you referring to table or view layout publishes?  If so, then these are run using the credentials specified when the publish container was created.  The same would be said about applications, and when you GTP them, the credentials you specified at the datastore level are used.

As for what you're seeing in the CAC at the top, it means that your content store (ABC) is being used as a repository for the planning store tables (if you look at the CS table structure, you should see a number of tables prefixed with 'P_<table_name>'.  When setting up cognos configuration, you would use a single service name for the 2 database objects required, but the userID (oracle user / schema) and password provided should be different.

The two users could look something like this: 
CS_101_1_production
PS_101_1_production

In the CAC, when you first open it after starting your services up for the first time, you should receive a prompt indicating that the planning tables don't exist, and you can click OK (or next) to have them created.  If you received errors at this point, then I would suspect that the user does not have sufficient privs to create the tables (or a number of other privs that may be missing could be causing the problem).

When adding the datastore to the CAC, you should be able to use either the CS or PS user, or you could use a completely different user ('system', as an example).  This setup does not configure what you see in the left pane above system settings, but rather whatever user ID you've specified in cognos configuration.

Hope this helps.