Prerequisites for archive and restore

Before running the archive utility, ensure that you provide the following prerequisites:

• Ensure that you are using database versions supported by BMC Decision Support for Server Automation. See Oracle database support and SQL Server database support for supported database versions.
• Back up your reports data warehouse to prevent data loss in case of failure during the archival process. For information about backing up your data warehouse, see your database documentation.
• Ensure that you have read/write permissions in the directory in which you want to store the archived files.

• Run extract, transform, and load (ETL) for all sites and ensure that the runs are complete. 

  Note

  Run ETL just before running the archive utility to ensure that no new ETL scripts are run.

• (Oracle only) Ensure that the following privileges are assigned to the reports data warehouse user:
  • GRANT CREATE ANY DIRECTORY TO datawarehouseUser
  • GRANT DROP ANY DIRECTORY TO datawarehouseUser
    
  • GRANT EXP_FULL_DATABASE TO datawarehouseUser
    
  • GRANT IMP_FULL_DATABASE TO datawarehouseUser 
  • GRANT EXECUTE ON utl_file TO datawarehouseUser
    
• (Microsoft SQL Server only) Assign the sysadmin role to the reports data warehouse user. You can revoke this role assignment when the archival and restore operations are complete.  

• (SQL Server only) If you are running the archive utility for the first time, ensure that you have enabled the xp_cmdshell server configuration option. This option enables system administrators to control whether the xp_cmdshell extended stored procedure can be executed on a system. By default, this option is disabled. It must be enabled to perform the delete operation on archived files. To enable the option, run the xp_configure system stored procedure on the reports data warehouse as a data warehouse user with the sysadmin role, as follows:
  

  EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
   
  GO
   
   
  -- To update the currently configured value for advanced options.
   
  RECONFIGURE
   
  GO
   
   
  -- To enable the feature.
   
  EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1
   
  GO
   
   
  -- To update the currently configured value for this feature.
   
  RECONFIGURE
   
  GO