When installing OpenFire there is an option to use the internal database or to use an external database such as SQL Server (or maybe Microsoft DeskTop DataBase Engine). This is installing version 3.4.5, however these questions probably apply to all OpenFire versions.
The install mentions performance being better with an external database.
Is using an external database significantly better or are there other benifits and can anyone help to quantify this better performance?
Using MSDB and the openfire_sqlserver.sql setup script gives the following warning:
>> Warning! The maximum key length is 900 bytes. The index ‘jiveSASLAuthoirzed_pk’
>> has maximum length of 4128 bytes. For some combination of large values, the
>> insert/update operation will fail.
Is this warning significant when OpenFire is in production?
Is using an external database significantly better or are there other benifits and can anyone help to quantify this better performance?
We recommend using the internal DB for evaluation purposes. However, we know that some small installations keep using the embedded DB in production (< 100 users). There are a few reasons why we recommend using an external DB:
Better administration and finetuning
No need to shutdown server to get a complete backup (with internal DB you may or may not get a complete snapshot)
Does not consume resources (memory and cpu) from Openfire since it runs in its own process even more when installed in another machine
Using MSDB and the openfire_sqlserver.sql setup script gives the following warning:
We never tried MSDB with Openfire. The scripts were tested in MS-SQL.
>> Warning! The maximum key length is 900 bytes. The index ‘jiveSASLAuthoirzed_pk’
>> has maximum length of 4128 bytes. For some combination of large values, the
>> insert/update operation will fail.
Is this warning significant when OpenFire is in production?
From the top of my head, that table in particular is used when doing SSO so you might be fine ignoring that warning.
For info we have been using the internal database for about a year in production with about 50 users with OpenFire running on a Windows Xp desktop, There have been no major problems since installation, this while the user count has been gradually increasing.
A Windows 2000 server with a decent specification has just come available from a recently closed project that should be significantly better as an OpenFire server than the current production system on XP. It already had MSDB installed hence the earlier question.
with the embedded database there’s only a very small chance to get an unusable hot backup of a running HSQLDB instance. I use it as standalone mode also for other applications as it’s very small. Of course it does not write archive or undo logs like Oracle so if I need a backup I lose the data which was updated within the last 0-24 hours.
One need to have good knowledge of a database to have “Better administration and finetuning” using one.