Lotus Dr.

DAOS: What happens when a document is moved from one file to another

Denny Russell   March 9 2012 08:10:31 AM

After many calls from customers, I've been doing some research to see what happens when documents are moved from one .nsf that has DAOS enabled to another .nsf.  While not surprising to me, the results seemed unexpected to some customers so I decided to write about it.  Here is what I found out.

My test went like this.
Step 1.  Send some attachments in emails and verifying that my DAOS folder is growing both at the OS level as well as issuing a Tell DAOSmgr dbsummary command at the console.
Flaw #1 in DAOS:  There is no field that shows what documents in an application (.nsf) contain attachments in DAOS store.  Going into the document properties, I should be able to confirm if an attachment is truly stored in there.

Step #2. I then set up 2 archive tests.  The third party archive that I am using locates documents based on age and places a copy of them to a .nsf database.  In the original email, the header of the message is left behind and the body is replaced by a footprint of text with a doclink pointing to the now archived document in the new location.
 
Test #1:
Archive to the same server.  Documents are archived and then re-check the dbsummary, I see that the count on my original mail file stays the same and now my archive file is added to the list and it contains x number of documents (where x is the number of documents archived that had attachments).

Test #2:
Archive to a different server - DAOS enabled. Documents are archived and then re-check the dbsummary, I see that the count on my original mail file stays the same and now my archive file is added to the list and it contains x number of documents (where x is the number of documents archived that had attachments).
Flaw #2 in DAOS: DAOS is not shared across servers, so in a large environment, the same attachment will be stored multiple times across the network.

Test #3:
Archive to a different server - DAOS not enabled. This one has different results and what I would expect based on the articles and my limited knowledge of DAOS.  Because DAOS is a store per server AND my new server is NOT running DAOS, the attachments are stored in the actual mail file.  I proved they were in the actual mail file on the new server by shutting down the other server so that the original server and it's DAOS store would not be available.  I was still able to open the attachment.
Flaw #3 in DAOS:  See flaw #1 above.

Notes:  The following must be true if you want the newly created file to also place the Attachment in DAOS.
1.  You have enabled DAOS to run See Quick Start Guide.

2. Your template or database that you are moving documents to has the DAOS flag enabled


3. You have the .ini parameter set
Create_R85_Databases=1

Hopefully you find this useful.  I would love to hear additional thoughts on this as well.

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