Siebel Marketing Installation and Administration Guide > Configuring Marketing Module Metadata > Setting Up Marketing Segmentation Metadata >
About Setting Up Cache for Target Levels
Marketing Server Cache has the following distinct properties:
- Criteria blocks are not cached by default. Users have to explicitly select the criteria blocks that they want to cache. This behavior is different than that of the Siebel Analytics Server cache. The exception is with segment trees where segment and remainder nodes are automatically marked for caching. In general, these nodes make good candidates for caching because the SQL to compute these nodes are usually expensive.
- Marketing Server Cache is temporary and it expires after a certain time. This is unlike the Siebel Analytics Server cache that is recycled based on disk size limit specified. The expiration time is configurable and is set in the following file:
SiebelAnalyticData\Web\Config\instanceconfig.xml file
The name of this parameter is MarketingCacheMaxExpireMinutes. When this value is not set, the default value used by the Marketing Server is 24 hours.
- Marketing Server Cache is stored in multiple tables with a fixed schema for each target level, unlike the Siebel Analytics Server cache that is stored in a file system.
- Marketing Server Cache entries are managed through the Admin link in the Siebel Analytics Web interface, unlike the Siebel Analytics Server cache that is managed through the Administration Tool. These entries can be found under the Database Cache section after you click Manage Marketing Jobs link.
- Caching of the same entity with different sampling factors creates different cache entries for each sampling factor for which the counts were run. If a criteria block was cached for a 20 percent sample and then, if counts are run for a sampling factor that is different, cache is not used.
- When updating counts, you can select the Refresh Cache property to make sure that you only query against the latest data. Any cache entries that would have been reused are deleted during this job.
Managing Marketing Cache
If you purchased the Siebel Data Warehouse version 7.7.1, the cache tables have been preconfigured and appropriately modeled in the Administration Tool. Use this topic to support users, troubleshoot issues, and maintain the cache tables. Perform the steps outlined in this topic if you create new target levels that were not preconfigured with the product. To understand and maintain the Marketing Server cache, follow these guidelines:
- Set the expiration parameter for the marketing cache to a value such that maximum response time efficiency is gained. The value is typically less than the database refresh frequency.
- After the database is refreshed, purge the affected caches before you start using segmentation.
- Cache can be removed for each user. For example, the cache entries that were created by a particular user can be removed without deleting all of the cache entries.
- Individual cache entries for a user cannot be deleted. You can delete all cache for a user or none.
- There is a limit to the number of cache entries that can be managed by the Marketing Server at any given time. This information is specified by the MarketingCacheMaxEntries parameter in the SiebelAnalyticData\Web\Config\instanceconfig.xml file. After the limit is reached then the oldest cache entries are removed approximately 20 percent at a time. The entries are removed from the Siebel Analytics Web and the specific Cache information is deleted from the database table.
- When Caching a criteria block, if the criteria block SQL can be fully function shipped to the database, then evaluation of the criteria block and the population in the cache is done in one single operation for efficiency purposes. If the criteria block SQL cannot be function-shipped then cache is created in two steps where the first one evaluates the criteria block and the second step populates the target-level IDs into the cache.
- The references to the cache entries are maintained in the Siebel Analytics Web Catalog. Therefore, if the Catalog file is replaced, then entries from the old catalog file are typically moved to the new catalog file.
Recommendations for Using Cache
The following are some recommendations for when to use cache:
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