Aptify provides support for SQL filegroups to allow administrators to create multiple filegroups to manage entities and indexes within Aptify. Leveraging the use of filegroups can have its advantages especially for large databases that are transaction driven. Dividing data and separating objects into different groups can improve performance and data organization as well as assist with backup, archival, and recovery management.
Note that an understanding of database/hardware design and your organization's needs is required to successfully take full advantage of this feature.
Filegroups are created at the SQL server level. Refer to Microsoft's on-line Help for information on how to create filegroup and add files with SQL Server Management Studio.
There are several ways to add entities and indexes to filegroups in Aptify:
- Addding Entities to Filegroups
- Adding Additional Base Tables to Filegroups
- Adding Text and Images to Filesgroups
Adding Entities to Filegroups
Follow these steps to add a new or existing entity to a filegroup:
- Open a new or existing Entities record.
- Open the Configurations tab.
- Using the drop-down menu, choose the filegroup for this entity from the File Group field.
- The default PRIMARY filegroup defined in SQL Server for the Aptify database is populated by default.
- The default PRIMARY filegroup defined in SQL Server for the Aptify database is populated by default.
- Add additional information to the Entities record as necessary.
- Save and close the Entities record.
Adding Additional Base Tables to Filegroups
Within Aptify, an entity can have multiple base tables that can be added to different filegroups. Follow these steps to add a newly added base table to a filegroup:
- Open a new or existing Entities record.
- Open a new Additional Base Tables record and enter a name for the new table in the Table field.
- See Creating Multiple Base Tables for more details on creating additional base tables to an entity.
- See Creating Multiple Base Tables for more details on creating additional base tables to an entity.
- Select a filegroup in the File Group field and click OK.
- Note that the Text/Image File Group field is disabled since no qualifying fields with text or image data types have been added to the table as of yet.
- Note that the Text/Image File Group field is disabled since no qualifying fields with text or image data types have been added to the table as of yet.
- Add additional tables as necessary.
- Click Close to close the Additional Base Tables dialog and return to the Entities record.
Adding Text and Images to Filesgroups
Aptify extends filegroup management by adding the ability to specifically group large text and image fields into a specified filegroup. If the entity contains a field with the SQL Data Type of nvarchar(max), varchar(max), ntext, or text, a filegroup can be selected to manage these text and image fields.
Follow these steps to add text and images to a filegroup:
- Open a new or existing Entities record.
- If not already done, add a field (or fields) to the Fields tab that meets the qualifying criteria.
- Only fields with the SQL Data Type of nvarchar(max), varchar(max), ntext, and text can be stored in the specified filegroup.
- See Defining Fields for details on how to add fields to an entity.
- Open the Configurations tab.
- Using the drop-down menu, choose the filegroup for nvarchar(max), varchar(max), ntext, and text fields from the Text/Image File Group field.
- The default PRIMARY filegroup defined in SQL Server for the Aptify database is populated by default.
- Note the filegroup to manage large text and images does not necessarily need to be different from the filegroups that manage the rest of the database data.
- Add additional information to the Entities record as necessary.
- Save and close the Entities record.