Planning your database configuration

To plan your database configuration, you need to know which databases must be in place and configured to use the software, which components of IBM® Business Process Manager you will use and their associated databases, the tasks required to administer the databases, and the security privileges of the database system that you are using.

For information on database tuning, see Chapter 5: Database configuration, tuning, and best practices in IBM Business Process Manager V8.5 Performance Tuning and Best Practices.

For IBM Business Process Manager, three separate databases are required for the Process Server, the Performance Data Warehouse, and the common database components.

In IBM Business Process Manager V8.5.5, the common (shared) database is split into two pieces. One is cell-scoped, used for the entire cell. The other is deployment-environment-scoped, and must be configured for each deployment environment.

The Process Server and Performance Data Warehouse components do not support case-sensitive databases. These databases must not be case-sensitive.

For Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, the following restrictions apply:

For Microsoft SQL Server databases, components other than Process Server or Performance Data Warehouse require that their databases be case-sensitive.
For Oracle databases, the Process Server, Performance Data Warehouse, and Common database components must use a separate schema/user. They can use the same instance.

When configuring databases, the system default tablespaces are used. However, if you want to use scripts that create custom tablespaces for the Business Process Choreographer and the Business Space components with DB2 and Oracle, and for the Messaging component with DB2 for z/OS, see the usetablespaces property as described in the Database and cell properties section of Configuration properties for the BPMConfig command.

You can run one of the following commands:

run BPMConfig -create -sqlfiles properties_file_name -outputDir output_directory
run BPMConfig -create -de properties_file_name when bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation is set to true.

The generated SQL files can be found in the output directory that you specified or in profile_root/dbscripts. The files include additional createTablespace*.sql files that you must run before the createSchema*.sql files to create the tablespaces for Business Process Choreographer or Business Space. The generated createSchema*.sql files include the appropriate references to the tablespaces that you specified.

Specifying the maximum number of concurrently active databases on a DB2 database server

The maximum number of databases that can be concurrently active on a DB2 database server is specified by the DB2 numdb parameter. If your IBM BPM installation has four Advanced deployment environments, the default numdb value of 8 is not sufficient and must be increased to at least 13 (4*3 +1).

To increase the value of the numdb parameter to 13, open a DB2 command window and run the following commands:

db2 get database manager configuration
db2 update dbm cfg using numdb 13
db2stop
db2start

Supported database types and JDBC providers

Choosing a database depends on your operating system and on the features that you will use with IBM Business Process Manager.

The following database types and providers are supported with IBM Business Process Manager V8.5.5:

Table 1. Supported database types and JDBC providers
Database type	JDBC provider
DB2®	DB2 Data Server JDBC Provider (XA)
DB2 for z/OS®	DB2 Universal JDBC Provider (XA) DB2 Universal JDBC Provider, to use the connection pool for DB2 for z/OS
Oracle	Oracle JDBC Provider
SQLServer	Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Provider

JDBC drivers and locations

The following table lists the names and locations of the JDBC drivers that are provided with the product.

Restriction: The JDBC driver used by IBM Business Process Manager might not be the latest JDBC driver level delivered with your database product. Compare the latest version of the JDBC driver that is available from the database vendor with the JDBC driver that is delivered with IBM Business Process Manager. If a later version is available, update to that driver.

The following supported JDBC drivers are included with the product installation files, where install_root is the installation location of IBM Business Process Manager.

Table 2. Supported JDBC drivers and locations that are provided with the product
Server	Driver description	Driver location
DB2	IBM DB2 Universal JDBC Driver 3.61.65	`install_root`/jdbcdrivers/DB2
DB2	IBM Data Server Driver for JDBC and SQLJ 4.11.69	`install_root`/jdbcdrivers/DB2
Oracle	Oracle JDBC Driver 11g 11.2.0.1.0	`install_root`/jdbcdrivers/Oracle
SQL Server	Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 4.0	`install_root`/jdbcdrivers/SQLServer

IBM Business Process Manager supports all JDBC drivers that are compatible with supported databases. Support for individual JDBC driver levels is not called out in the IBM EMMS Clearinghouse Program or the Software Product Compatibility Reports (SPCR) tool.