Command Center Database Administration

Post date: Nov 08, 2012 8:39:44 PM

Data collected by Command Center agents is stored in a dedicated database called gpperfmon within the Greenplum Database instance. This database requires the typical database maintenance tasks such as clean up of old historical data and periodic ANALYZE.

See “Command Center Database Reference”  for a reference of the tables and views in the gpperfmon database.

Connecting to the Command Center Database

Database administrators can connect directly to the Command Center database (gpperfmon) using any Greenplum Database-compatible client program (such as psql). For example:

$ psql -d gpperfmon -h master_host -p 5432 -U gpadmin

Backing Up and Restoring the Command Center Database

The history tables of the Command Center database (gpperfmon) can be backed up and restored using the Greenplum Database parallel backup and restore utilities (gp_dump, gp_restore, gpcrondump, gpdbrestore). See the Greenplum Database Administrator Guide for more information.

Because the Command Center database has a low number of tables, you may prefer to devise a backup plan using the table-level backup features of gp_dump. For example, you can create scripts to run gp_dump to back up the monthly partitions of the historical data tables on a monthly schedule. Alternately, you can back up your Command Center database at the database level.

Maintaining the Historical Data Tables

All of the *_history tables stored in the Command Center database (gpperfmon) are partitioned into monthly partitions. A January 2010 partition is created at installation time as a template partition (it can be deleted once some current partitions are created). The Command Center agents automatically create new partitions in two month increments as needed. Administrators must periodically drop partitions for the months that are no longer needed in order to maintain the size of the Command Center database. See the Greenplum Database Administrator Guide for more information on dropping partitions of a partitioned table.