Technical References

1-41
Cisco Prime Service Catalog 10.0 Reporting Guide
OL-31037-01
Chapter 1 Advanced Reporting Data Mart
Best Practices for Service Design and Reporting
Note SQLServer cautions against having tables with a row length greater than 8k (8192) bytes. This would
impose a significant constraint on the size of the service dimension tables. Since no such limits are
present in Oracle, you can increase the number of columns of each data type and the size of the text
column up to a 32k total row size limit.
An option for increasing the number of columns in the dictionary and service tables is to decrease the
size of the character (VARCHAR) columns from its default value of 200 characters (specified via the
DATA_STRING_MAX_SIZE property described below.) Since the maximum size of character columns
applies to all dictionaries (and services), be cautious if you decide to decrease this value. Any textual
data longer than the specified size is truncated.
The number of columns of each type cannot be changed after the tables have been created by the Install
process.
Maximum Size of Character Fields
The maximum size of character fields in the data mart dictionary and service tables is set, by default, to
200 characters. This is the size of all character (text) fields in all tables—both dictionaries and services.
This property can be changed after the initial data mart installation only by running a script available
from Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC).
Character fields accommodate data represented on service forms as single-line (text) and multi-line
(textarea) fields, as well as radio buttons. One or more selections from check boxes and multi-select
drop-down lists are all included in the same data mart character field, with options separated by commas.
Care should be taken both when setting the maximum size of character fields. If the size is too small,
data may be severely truncated; this typically affects description and comments fields. If the size is too
large, performance of both the ETL process and generating reports may be adversely affected.
Do the Math
Follow the procedure below to determine how to configure the data mart to support the site’s reportable
dictionaries and services:
• Review the reporting requirements, to determine how many dictionaries and how many services
should be reportable.
• Review the selected dictionaries (and services, if any) to determine the maximum number of each
type of field (Character, Numeric, Date) required.
Parameter Default Value SiteValue
NUMBER_OF_DICTIONARY_VARCHAR_FIELDS 40
NUMBER_OF_DICTIONARY_NUMERIC_FIELDS 10
NUMBER_OF_DICTIONARY_DATE_FIELDS 10
NUMBER_OF_SERVICE_VARCHAR_FIELDS 80
NUMBER_OF_SERVICE_NUMERIC_FIELDS 20
NUMBER_OF_SERVICE_DATE_FIELDS 20
Parameter Default Value SiteValue
DATA_STRING_MAX_SIZE 200