Storage Partitioning

By default a storage is partitioned by date. That means that if you drill down by a date, Vantage Ultimate does not have to read the entire storage to retrieve that information. It only has to look at the partition in the storage for the date you have drilled down into.

However sometimes you don't want to drill down into the Date Summary first. You may want to view a User's data for all dates. In this case, Vantage Ultimate needs to read the entire storage to get that information.

Vantage Ultimate lets you choose the summary that your storage should be partitioned by.

You can also partition your storage by multiple summaries to further break your storage into more partitions.

Note: It is important to note that too much partitioning can actually slow analysis and reporting when more than one partition needs to be analyzed. For example, a report on your entire organization using a storage partitioned by User and Date will be slower than when using a storage partitioned only by date. Report will only be faster with the 'user' partitioned storage when running reports filtered by users. This is because there is a small performance penalty for Vantage to switch partitions during analysis or reporting.

You can only choose the partitioning scheme on an empty storage. That is, before you import data, or when a storage has been cleared. You can choose the partitioning of a storage when importing data for the first time or on the Storage properties dialog.

To partition a storage when importing data:

  1. Click the Import Logs link in the Inputs task pad to launch the Input dialog.
  2. Ensure you configure the first three pages correctly (see Importing log files) then go to the Partitions page of the Input dialog.
  3. Select the summaries you would like to partition the storage by and click OK.

To partition a storage using the storage properties dialog:

  1. Select an existing storage that you have imported data into.
  2. Clear the storage by clicking the Clear Storage link. This will clear the storage of all data, but keep reference to the log files importing previously so they can be re-imported after the partitioning change.
  3. Right-click the storage and select Properties from the pop-up menu. This launches the Storage Properties dialog.
  4. Click the Partitioning tab and check the Summaries you would like to partition your storage by.
  5. Click OK to save the changes.
  6. You will then need to re-import your data by clicking the Reload all button in the right hand pane.

Tip: Choose a summary that you frequently drilldown into that doesn't contain thousands of items. If you have more than 5000 partitions in your storage, importing can be quite slow as for each line in your log file, there is a calculation to work out what partition to file the hit under. Drilling down into anything other than the partitioned summary can also be slow. For example, if you partition your data by Source IPs and URLs you can end up with hundreds of thousands of storage partitions, each with very little data. If you don't drilldown into those partitions, Vantage Ultimate will have to read every single partition.