Archiving Settings Screen
Archiving is the process of clearing out signals (client history), activation notes, work orders, and operator maintenance logs from the system. Data that is more than several months old is infrequently used and is placed into an archive database. Once this archived data becomes too old it is removed completely from the archive database. If archiving is not enabled, a warning will be displayed in the System Status icon. Archiving is very important for two reasons,
Database efficiency and performance
Our recommended settings for Archiving is between 3-6 months of history in the current database. This is just a guideline, and it depends on many factors, such as:
As data builds up in the database, system performance will be reduced, especially when taking backups or running scheduled reports. More powerful server hardware can postpone this effect, but not eliminate it.
Database Size restrictions
If you are using the full version of SQL database, your only restriction is physical disk space. However if you are using a free / Express edition there is a maximum limit on the database size. If this limit is reached, no new data can be added, which will cause Patriot to stop functioning. Archiving is essential if a free or Express edition of SQL is being used.
The archiving settings screen can be accessed from System ->Database -> Archiving Settings. From this screen, archiving can be configured and checked.
The following settings can be configured on this screen.
| Maximum Number of Signals in Current Database | For efficiency reasons, this setting is set to a number of signals, not number of days/months. A good estimate can be calculated by multiplying (the number of clients in the database) x (the average signals per client per day) x (number of days of current log). For example 2500 clients x 3 signals per day x 180 days = 1,350,000. Enter this value into the Maximum Number of Signals in Current Database field. Once the database contains more than this number of signals, the oldest signals get moved into the archive database. The special value 0 can be used to allow an unlimited number of signals to be stored, however it is not recommended to leave this value as 0. |
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| Maximum Days of Current Operator Log/Work Order | Specifies how many days old the operator maintenance log, and work orders are before they are moved into the archive database. |
| Maximum Number of Signals in Archive Database | Calculate this value in the same way as Maximum Number of Signals in Current Database. This specifies how many signals are keep in the archive database before they are permanently removed from the system. For example, if 1,000,000 signals in the Current Database and 1,000,000 signals in the archive database are specified, 2,000,000 total signals will be kept in the system. |
| Maximum Days of Archived Operator Log/Work Order | Specifies how many days old the operator maintenance log, and work orders are before they are removed from the archive database. |
| Number of Months to Store Recording Videos. | Specifies how many months worth of operator camera action recordings to store in the primary Video Storage directory. Older recordings will be automatically tranferred, daily, to the Archived Video Storage directory. |
| Archive Every | Decides how often during the day archiving should be run, setting this to 30 minutes will have minimal impact on performance of the system during the day as smaller more frequent archives run much quicker. The archiving process is gradual to help maintain good system performance. Only small amounts of data being will be archived off at a time so it is recommended to archive every 30 minutes to frequently reduce the size of the current database. |
| Time of Day to perform Archiving | Set this early in the morning, use 1:00am unless this conflicts with another automatic procedure, such as backups. |
Click on the Enable Archiving button to enable archiving.
If you need to make changes to any of these settings, make a note of the current settings, click on Disable Archiving, re-enter the corrected settings, then press Enable Archiving.
To view the current status of the system, the Signal Statistics section of the Archiving Settings screen allows you to calculate the total number and age of signals in both the main and archive databases. To view this data, select the Refresh icon. On larger databases, this may take a few minutes to complete. This section can be used to verify that archiving is maintaining the database correctly.
Manual archiving can also be performed using the Patriot Utilities program, which can be found in the Patriot Version 6 Client installation folder. This is typically C:\Program Files\Patriot Systems\Patriot Version 6 Client\. Simply run the UtilitiesProgram.exe application, and select Maintenance →Database→Manual Archiving. This program can be run while Patriot is offline, so the SQL login details must be entered before running the archive process. From this screen, the Signal Statistics can be viewed or manual one-off archiving done. This can be useful if the Patriot database ever reaches the database size limits or if a large number of signals is added to the system, affecting performance.