Tips for Working with the IT Data Mart

Managing IT Data Marts

Here are some tips that can help you manage IT data marts effectively:

Do not create IT data marts with duplicate names. If IT data marts do not have unique names, generated information maps might not be placed in the correct job.
Store all data and information maps in the IT data mart.
You can create IT data marts in different folders. The choice of a parent folder should reflect your intended use. For example, if you intend to share access to a new IT data mart, the /Shared Data/SAS IT Resource Management/IT Data Marts location is a logical place to create it. The /Products and /System folders are intended for product configuration files. Users are not typically permitted to write to these folders. Therefore, do not create IT data marts in those folders.
The organization of your site's data into IT data marts depends on your site's needs. You do not have to put data from multiple adapters into the same IT data mart, and you are not prevented from doing so. If you decide to use multiple IT data marts, you can still combine data from the various IT data marts using information maps or other similar techniques.

Archiving Your Data

SAS IT Resource Management does not provide an automated archiving feature. However, archiving is easy to accomplish. If you want to archive your staged data, in the staging job add another transformation that copies the staged table to a secure location. To do so, you can use the Extract or User-Written Code transformations that are provided by SAS Data Integration Studio in the Data section of the Transformations tree. (For information about these transformations, see “Working with Extract Transformations” and “Working with User-Written Code” in the Help for SAS Data Integration Studio.)

Storing Data Tables on z/OS Systems

For best results, store data tables in the UFS file system instead of the traditional z/OS file system.

Note: The documentation for SAS on z/OS has traditionally used the terms UNIX System Services (USS) and hierarchical file system (HFS) to refer to the UNIX file system on z/OS. The SAS 9.2 documentation uses the terms UNIX file system and UFS to refer to this file system. UFS provides a hierarchical storage system (like UNIX or Windows) with outstanding performance. Using UFS for storing data tables can simplify the management of these tables and offer performance benefits over the traditional z/OS file system.

Deleting IT Data Marts

Here are some tips that can help you delete IT data marts effectively:

Deleting an IT data mart might take a long time, depending on the contents of that IT data mart.
When the IT data mart was created, the physical location for the Admin library was created. As certain wizards are executed, such as the Adapter Setup wizard, other physical locations are created. These physical locations each contain a readme.txt file that carries information about the IT data mart to which the library belongs. When that IT data mart is deleted, the physical tables that belong to that IT data mart are deleted. However, the directory structure is not deleted, and the readme.txt files remain for identification purposes. The physical directories that belonged to a deleted IT data mart are empty and can be removed from the location where they were specified.