TDW under the covers - continued

The TDW database itself may reside on a number of platforms, including Linux, UNIX, Windows and z/OS.  The other required infrastructure is the Tivoli Warehouse Proxy process and the Summarization and Pruning agent process.  These processes may run on Linux, UNIX, or Windows.  Note that these processes do not run on native z/OS (although they could run on Linux on z).  That means if you run the TDW on DB2 on z/OS, you will also need to have the Warehouse Proxy and Summarization/Pruning agent running on  a separate platform, such as Linux, UNIX, or Windows. 

So we've looked at what happens within the agent (TEMA) task when historical collection is started. You should see messages indicating collection has begun, and be able to see if data is being gathered, and for which tables. The next question is how does the historical data get from the TEMA to the Tivoli Data Warehouse (TDW)? That is the job of the Warehouse Proxy process.

When you define history collection you also specify if the history data is to go to the TDW, and if so, how often that data should be sent to the TDW  (anywhere from once per day to every 15 minutes).  Sending data to the TDW on a regular interval is usually preferable to sending large quantities of data only once or twice per day.  This would avoid large bursts of activity to the TDW. 

It's the job of the Warehouse Proxy process to gather data from the various agents, as specified by the TDW interval, and send the data to the TDW database.  The TDW database consists of tables that correlate to the respective TEMA tables being gathered.  If the required table does not already exist in the database, it's the job of the Warehouse Proxy to create the table.  Here we see an example of the messages from the Warehouse Proxy log that document table creation for our Common Storage (COMSTOR) table:

(Friday, July 6, 2012, 10:17:31 AM-{1684}khdxdbex.cpp,1716,"createTable") "Common_Storage" - Table Successfully Created in Target Database

(Friday, July 6, 2012, 10:17:31 AM-{1684}khdxdbex.cpp,1725,"createTable") "Common_Storage" - Access GRANTed to PUBLIC

Once the Warehouse Proxy process has the table defined, you should be able to display the tables in DB2 (using tools like the DB2 Control Center), and issue SQL selects to see the data in the tables, as shown below:

In the above example we see the Common Storage table in DB2, we see the cardinality column which indicates the number of rows in the table, and we can also run SQL Selects against the table to display the contents.  By doing this we can verify that the data is now flowing to the TDW.