Administering the database

This topic provides the procedure for changing the MySQL root password and links to database administration information on the MySQL website:

• • To change the MySQL root password
  • Recommendation for backing up the existing database
  • Database data recovery
  • Data retention configuration
  • Database table optimization

On each computer with a BMC Application Diagnostics Portal or Collector component, you can modify the MySQL root password. The password is required when you need to backup, restore, and perform other maintenance tasks on the database.

If the BMC Application Diagnostics Portal and the BMC Application Diagnostics Collector are installed on the same host, both the portal and collector databases are affected by changing the password, regardless of which script you use to change the password.

To change the MySQL root password

1. At a command line, navigate to the following directory:
   • Windows
     <installationDirectory>\portal\bin\db
     or
     <installationDirectory>\collector\bin\db
     The default <installationDirectory> is C:\Program Files\BMC Software\BMC Application Diagnostics
   • Linux
     <installationDirectory>\portal\bin\db
     or
     <installationDirectory>\collector\bin\db
     The default <installationDirectory> is /opt/bmc/BMC_Application_Diagnostics
2. Enter the following command:
   • Windows
     change-db-root-password.bat
   • Linux
     change-db-root-password.sh
3. At the Enter password prompt, enter the current password. The default password is admysql.
4. At the New password prompt, enter a new password, using a strong password that comprises:
   • A minimum of 10 characters
   • Two of the following nonalphabetic characters that are noncontiguous:
     0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + - =
5. At Confirm password, enter the new password again.

Recommendation for backing up the existing database

BMC recommends that you make a physical backup of the actual data files. The output of a physical backup contains data files that the mysqld server can use directly, resulting in a faster recovery operation.

For more information about making MySQL backup files, see Database Backup Methods.

Database data recovery

For information about how to recover the database data, see recovering a database.

Data retention configuration

Data retention is set during installation of the BMC Application Diagnostics Collector. You can change the data retention configuration anytime by changing the values of the following properties in the collector.properties file:

• retention.time — The period of time, in days, to retain data in the database
• db.max.size — The maximum size of the database in megabytes (MB). Default: 100000MB = 100GB

Database table optimization

To re-index database tables, use the optimize tables script. Due to the way in which BMC Application Diagnostics works with the database, you rarely need to run this script. You should run it only if performance degrades and analysis shows that the reason is fragmented indexes.