Overview of Database-Based DMS Solutions

PPM Center offers the following database-based DMS solutions:

• PPM Database DMS — Allows you to store all the documents and associated metadata in your PPM database, and provides documents check-in/out and versioning functionalities out-of-the-box. It requires no additional software or hardware products, no additional deployment or configuration. In addition, no extra license cost.

• PPM External Database DMS — Provides the same features as the PPM Center Database DMS solution, except that the documents and associated metadata are stored in a different Oracle database on your local network where your PPM Server is located. For information about defining an external database for this DMS solution, see Configuring PPM External Database DMS Solution.

Contents of the documents (in whatever document format) are stored in BLOB fields. The database-based DMS solutions leverage Oracle TEXT to provide full-text search, and the related indexes are CONTEXT indexes, both for metadata and document contents.

PPM Center users experience no difference between a PPM Server using Documentum (either OpenText version or stand-alone version) and a PPM Server using an Oracle database-based DMS. The only small discrepancy lies in the full text search, where the advanced search operators are slightly different, and the Oracle database-based DMS solutions allow you to search only in the tip documents, or in both the tip version documents and the history.

Therefore, organizations who are managing their PPM documents using other solutions, EMC Documentum or the PPM file system, can easily migrate their current DMS to either of the new database-based DMS solution. For details on how to migrate to a database-based DMS solution, see Migrating DMS Using the Administrator Console Tool.

The following table describes server configuration parameters that were introduced to implement the database-based DMS solutions.

Server configuration parameters introduced

Parameter name	Description, Usage	Default and Valid Values
DMS_DB_ENABLE_FULLTEXT_SEARCH	Setting this value to true enables the database full text search feature. Note that administrators shall create and build database indexes in advance. For details, see Configuring Full Text Search in Database-Based DMS Solutions.	Default: false Valid values: true, false
DMS_FILENAME_DISPLAY_LENGTH	Specifies filename display length.	Default: 30 Valid values: integer
DMS_FILENAME_SEARCH_MAX_RESULTS	Specifies maximum number of matching items before applying filters from other search criteria, such as creation date or "Closed" status. You may need to increase this value if too many filename matching items are filtered out by very selective search criteria.	Default: 1000 Valid values: integer
DMS_MIGRATION_DELAY_BETWEEN_DOCUMENT	Specifies duration (in seconds) that a thread waits between two documents to migrate. To lighten the load of the migration process on the PPM Server, increase the value of this parameter.	Default: 0 Valid values: integer
DMS_MIGRATION_DOCUMENTS_BATCH_SIZE	Specifies the number of documents that to be queued for migration on a given PPM Service node. Every time the DMS Migration Engine Service runs on a Service node, the queue of documents to migrate is filled up.	Default: 1000 Valid values: integer
DMS_MIGRATION_THREAD_COUNT	Specifies number of threads that migrate documents on a given PPM Service node.	Default: 3 Valid values: integer
MAX_WEB_ATTACHMENT_SIZE_IN_MB	Specifies maximum attachment size (in MB) for files uploaded using PPM web interface. Attachments size is capped at 2 GB.	Default: 2048 Valid values: integer