How to: Understand Agility Datamart Database growth

Question

How do we know how much the Agility Datamart Database grow?

Answer

The Agility Data Mart database is a denormalized representation of your highly-normalized Agility application database. The Data Mart database is optimized for reporting over large volumes of historical data and slicing results across various dimensions. As such, the size of the database is expected to be an order of magnitude larger than the database used by your Agility application instance, and it is expected to grow continuously over time.

Initial database size is determined by the amount of data in your Agility application instance and the amount of historical data. When estimating the initial size of the database, a good rule of thumb is to expect a size 5-10 times larger than your Agility application database.

The growth of the database also depends on the amount of data in your Agility instance and how the instance is used. When adding new projects, or growing existing projects, the database will grow at a faster rate. During periods of management and tracking, the database will grow at a slower rate.

Recommendations

Based on our experience, we recommend the following when considering Data Mart database size and growth

1. When considering storage for any data mart and/or data warehouse do not think in terms of disk drives, think in terms of disk systems; for example Storage Area Networks
2. Start by expecting a database 10x the size of your Agility application database
3. After the initial load, monitor the database size daily for several weeks to determine growth patterns
4. Respond accordingly
5. Keep monitoring the database size on a less frequent basis as appropriate