Lotus Nut

On April 16, 2009, IBM released version 1.4 of the DAOS estimator. I like some of the new options.

They are:

• -i option allows the estimator to run on an indirect file which contains a list of databases to run against.
• -c options causes the estimator to write attachment data to a CSV file for later processing. This is up to 65% faster to acquire data.
• -a option analyzes a CSV file created with the -c option. This option can also be used to analyze a set of CSV files using an '.ind' file to list the CSV files.
• -p option generates an estimate of the estimate by running against a percentage of databases and extrapolating the results.

Something that IBM hasn't pointed out in the technote is that it appears that using the -c option will allow for you to run multiple instances of the Estimator and then offload the analysis to a different server. Consider that you have multiple mail directories. If you run the estimator against each of them using the -c option, this will likely finish faster for acquiring the data. Then, you should be able to copy those CSV files to another box and use the -a -i option to analyze the multiple CSV files without hogging more CPU on your production mail server. Remember, it took Mitch Cohen around 5 days to run the estimator on a big server with 7,000 mail files. So, having that task not perform the analysis on a mail server would definitely help out!

By the way, indirect files are one of the most under-utilized options with Domino. Look into them and start using them! :)