Disaster Recovery Planning for Site Server 3.0 Analysis (239782)

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The following steps are considered best practices when setting up databases for use in Site Server Analysis.

1. Create a new Microsoft SQL Server database, following the guidelines in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

   216559 How to Estimate the Database Size for Site Server Analysis

2. In the Server Manager window of the Usage Import module of Site Server Analysis, configure the Log Data Sources, Servers, and Sites as appropriate for your Web sites.
3. Prior to importing any log files, go into SQL Server and create a backup of that database. This will preserve the Server Manager schema and will obviate the need to enter this information again in the event of data loss or database corruption.
4. Import log files normally.

In the event of data loss or database corruption, if you have followed these procedures it is easy to delete the corrupt database, restore the archived database with the Server Manager information, and import the log files again.

This plan can also help you to create a more streamlined data warehouse. For example, many users keep a year's worth of data online, but only create reports for the previous month. This creates very large databases and Report Writer operates very slowly because it has to parse through a large amount of unrelated data in order to create reports.

Using the procedures described above, you could restore just the Server Manager backup, import all the logs for say, June, create the June reports, and then archive and delete the June database. After once again restoring just the Server Manager data from backup, you could then import July's logs, run the July reports, and so on.

A streamlined way to preserve historical data and create reports on an entire year's worth of data is to output reports to both HTML and Excel formats simultaneously. Next, combine all the resulting Excel worksheets into a single workbook and create running or cumulative totals from that data using Excel worksheet functions.