Glossary

The following list of terms may help you understand the terminology related to CMDB, its activities, processes, and so on.

CI (configuration item)

This could be any asset or device in a company such as a computer, computer peripheral, server, air conditioning unit, software application, and the organization itself.

dataset

Collection of data that is grouped together by a common value that is set in the DatasetID field of a CI.

identification

Process that identifies records where ReconciliationIdentity (REID) is equal to zero. Any CI where REID is not zero is considered as identified.

identification group

Set of identification rules that qualify data to acquire non-zero REID from the target dataset. target dataset is the dataset into which the record will be merged or inserted during the Merge activity.

merge

Merging of data from two or more records into one production record. Typically BMC.ASSET.

orphan

A record that would typically not be found in the CMDB and related with a 'hosted' type of relationship, unless it is hosted on a machine and imported as a related item to that host. For example IpEndPoint is a hosted CI. This would also be called a weak related CI.

precedence group

Set of weights assigned to a particular data value that is considered more valuable when compared to other data.

precedence set

Collection of Dataset references where each dataset is associated with a weight assigned to it by the associated precedence group.

ReconciliationIdentity

This is an attribute which is assigned to a configuration item (CI). Its purpose is to streamline identification of records as they propogate from data sources into one production dataset.

relationship

This is a property that defines how two CIs are related. A relationship is often normalized to have a common name, impact direction and cardinality. BMC's CDM (common data model) predicts the relationships between common class IDs and attempts to restrict types of relationships between classes. Relationships can also be 'weak' although no one refers to a relationships as 'strong'. Relationships are either weak or not weak.

soft deleted

CI or relationship that is marked for deletion in the next purge activity. Any record that has the value of MarkedAsDeleted as Yes (MAD.Y) is considrered as 'soft deleted' and any CI that has been deleted from the database is known as hard deleted.

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)

This is a platform independent framework functioning like a directory that provides a mechanism to locate and register web services on the internet.

Parallel hierarchy

A copy of the existing CDM hierarchy. The denormalization changes are first implemented in the parallel hierarchy.

Refresh class

Classes that are immediate children of the denormalized classes.

New class

Classes in the parallel hierarchy that are denormalized by converting to categorization sub class.