Overview of Database-Based DMS Solutions

PPM Center offers the following database-based DMS solutions:

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

  • OpenText 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 OpenText 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 OpenText PPM documents using other solutions, EMC Documentum or the OpenText 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 Migrate DMS using the DMS Migration page.

Note: By default, document contents are stored in the default OpenText PPM tablespace USER_CLOB, while the metadata and the TEXT indexes (when created) are stored in the default OpenText PPM tablespace USER_DATA. DBAs can change the tablespaces used by OpenText PPM Database DMS. For example, to save DB disk space by compressing documents contents, or by tuning tablespace-level settings that would provide better performance for their specific usage. Such customization of tablespace is supported, but out of the scope of this document.

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 Configure full text search in Database-Based DMS solutions.

Default: false

Valid values: true, false

DMS_FILENAME_DISPLAY_LENGTH

Specifies file name 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 file name 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 OpenText PPM web interface. Attachments size is capped at 2 GB.

Default: 2048

Valid values: integer