Configuring a Record Store Instance

This section provides detailed information about the IAS Record Store service and explains how to configure a Record Store instance.

About record generations
A set of records that has been committed to a Record Store instance is a record generation.
About transactions
A transaction is an access operation in the Record Store by another component. Transactions provide a means to keep one operation isolated from another operation and allow each to operate independently.
About the last read generation for a client
A Record Store instance can save the last read generation and also track that generation for any number of unique clients. You specify a unique client by creating a client ID, which can be any string, such as rsreader1, and then set a value to indicate the last-read generation for that client ID. If you are using Integrator, you can use the default client ID of Integrator.
About deleted records
Any client of the Record Store (including Integrator ETL, the IAS Server, the Web Crawler, and the IAS API) can modify and delete records that are written to the Record Store. Clients either update or insert a record, delete a record, or delete all records. This topic describes the Endeca.Action property that the Record Store examines to determine whether to update or insert or delete records.
Configuring a Record Store instance
Each uniquely named Record Store instance has its own configuration settings. You can run the get-configuration task of the Record Store Command-line Utility to save the configuration settings to a file, or you can create the file manually.
Configuration properties for a Record Store instance
The Record Store supports the configuration properties listed in the table below.
Change properties and new Record Store instances
When IAS creates a new Record Store instance for a crawl, it uses all record properties as change properties. In other words, IAS evaluates all properties on a record to determine if the record is different from the previous generation's record.
Deleting stale generations of records
This topic provides guidance about how to delete stale generations of records by appropriately setting the generationRetentionTime property.
Disabling automatic management of a Record Store instance
If you want maintain a Record Store instance separately from its associated crawl configuration, you can disable automatic management of the Record Store instance by the IAS Server and move a Record Store instance to another host as necessary. This may be useful if storage space for a Record Store instance is a concern and in some migration scenarios.
Performance considerations when using a Record Store instance
When reading or writing large numbers of records, some READ_WRITE operations can take long periods of time. Read operations generally take longer than write operations for similar size record sets, and the transaction time of a READ_WRITE operation grows approximately linearly as the number of records grows and the size of the records grows. For this reason, delta updates are generally faster than baseline updates.