Database storage and size

Report · Jan 06, 2009

We are just setting up the live RoboSource database. In order to determine which database server the admins will place the database, they would like to get a rough estimate of the size of the database. I realize that a large part of this answer depends on the number of projects and the size of those projects.

What I am looking for is the method used for stoage of the changes. Does RoboSource store just the delta (changes) or does it store a complete copy of the changed files.

We have some projects that may not be that large, but are changed daily and sometimes mutiple times in a day. So if the files are saved for each change, the database could grow very large very quickly.

I have looked in the help files and on the web with little or no results.

Thanks,
Jay

Report · Jan 07, 2009

Hi Jay and welcome to the RH community.

To be honest the think the reason why you have not been able to find out the imformation you require is because it is so open to outside influences (e.g. file size, file content, etc.) to make it a fairly pointless exercise. What is a good size database for one user would be completely inadequate to another.

I don't know whether the DB stores delta changes or a complete copy as I don't use RH's source control software perferring to use another supplier. I can say that there appear to be no hard or fast rules with what is stored. Certain file types (e.g. flat text files) may store delta data because it is easy to know what has changed from one file version to another. Binary files for example make this much more difficult so it common for a copy of a file to be stored. To complicate things, some source control applications have a file size limit. Microsoft's VSS is 2GB for example.

Not sure if any of the above helps

Maybe the way forward is to create a test database and perform some changes and see how the database size grows. From there you'll be able to make a better guess for the live DB size.

Report · Jan 07, 2009

Thanks for the welcome. And I understand what you are saying about the variables. We have about a third of our projects in the test database, and it is about 200 meg. I just don't want to get set up with a 1 gig space only to find out in a month of changes, it is up to 6 gig and needs to go to a different server. Database administrator would not be pleased with me at all. ;)

I just got off the phone with Adobe 'help' and the answer they gave me (once I phrased the question in a manner he understood what I wanted) is that the original text based file is stored, then the changes are stored.

So you have the original file and a series of deltas.

I think that would be a bit difficult to do with binaries, images and pdfs, so that may be different.

I will be doing a bit more testing, but at least I have a bit more to go on.

Jay

Report · Mar 18, 2009

Hi I think I can help with this.
We started off using the free SQLExpress option when we set up our original database and found it worked fine for RoboHelp, but the 4 GB limit of SQLExpress became a problem with a large Captivate project we were also keeping under RSC. We have since upgraded to the least expensive SQL Server option, and other than having to refer to it as SQLExpress when setting up the database have had no issues.

I just recently rebuilt our databases in order to produce Web Help and the project folders are 305 mb (~23k files, 325 folders) and the database size is 284mb. Thats for ~20 projects for merged WebHelp.