Introduction

Datamart is a complementary product to StarTeam Server. Datamart uses the StarTeam Server SDK to communicate with StarTeam Server to create a reporting database that you can use with popular third party reporting applications such as Crystal Reports and Business Objects (reporting applications are not included with Datamart). Datamart connects directly to the database to create a reporting database.

Datamart can extract information from every project, every view in each project, every folder in each view, and every item in each folder, as well as labels, links, and history for each item. You can restrict the extracting to a particular project and view, and also restrict to extract only for certain tables.

A sample Business Objects universe and sample reports in both Business Objects and Crystal Reports formats are included. These samples can be used as a basis for creating custom user-defined reports.

Usage Overview

In general, you will perform the following actions when working with Datamart:

• Create a database to store the information extracted by Datamart. You can use one database for multiple server configurations.
• Create extraction properties file(s) in Datamart Extractor. This program extracts the data from StarTeam Server and puts the data into a relational database. The data is stored in meaningful text instead of IDs. For StarTeam Server administrator use. You can be quite specific when creating these properties files. You can specify a single project or all projects for a server configuration and when specifying a single project, you can specify a single view or all views in that project.
• Run the Datamart Extractor to populate the designated database with information from the project(s) and view(s) specified in your extraction properties files.
• If using Business Objects 6.5 or above, run Datamart Synchronizer to synchronize the Business Objects universe. For StarTeam Server Administrator use. If using Crystal Reports 10 or above, there is no need to synchronize anything. You can run Crystal Reports to view your reports.

Using a Task Scheduler

The most common way to extract data using Datamart is to schedule it using a task scheduler (like a Microsoft Windows task scheduler). Most users schedule the Datamart task to be run on a nightly basis. Users who prefer frequent updates need to schedule the tasks more frequently like every hour. Although this suffices most user's requirements, it still does not provide real-time reporting.

Continuous Mode

The continuous data extraction mode provides near real-time data reporting. This feature requires an MPX-enabled StarTeam Server for optimal performance. With this option, Datamart will run as a continuous process listening to events on the views/projects that have been selected for extraction and only queries the database when there is an update of interest on the server.

Continuous mode is a checkbox option on the Database tab. The option is not enabled by default. If enabled, the default interval scheduled for refresh is 5 minutes and is configurable as scheduledRefreshInterval in the .stxtract file.