Windows install - connect_cdc_sqdata - Latest

Most customers utilize a special "sqdata_user" account established specifically for that purpose because it usually needs elevated privileges to read and apply data. If necessary have the system administrator create that account.

If Connect CDC (SQData) is going to be used to access any local databases, the user will need privileges to operate on those databases. Those privileges include SELECT, DELETE, INSERT, and UPDATE.

While there is no specific location that Connect CDC (SQData) must be installed, this section describes two platform dependent installation scenarios. The most important thing to consider when picking an install directory to make sure all the users that need to access the package have permission to access it. Depending on what type of environment our product is being used in (Production/Test/Development), there can be dramatically different security concerns from very stringent to everyone having administrative privileges on the machine. The first level of security is specifying file system access to executables.

On Windows systems, 32-bit executables are typically installed in C:/Program Files (x86) under a directory named for the product, eg: C:/Program Files (x86)/sqdata. Administrator privileges are required to create the directory and unzip the package into this location. To allow multiple users to access the directory without giving access to everyone, the system administrator can define a group and grant permissions on the directory to the group.

Alternatively, the product can be installed into the home directory of the user designated to run the capture/apply process, eg: /users/<sqdata_user>/sqdata. To install to this location no special privileges are required, and the user can grant permissions on the directory to a group of users without administrator privileges.

From this point, the installation directory will be referred to as <SQDATA_DIR>.

Locate the package needed for your platform. Once you have identified which package is to be installed, click on the appropriate link to download the compressed package to your desktop or directly to the Installation location previously selected.

The package is distributed as a compressed file with the extension .zip representing the compression method. On Windows, you can right click on the file and select "Extract All". This will open a dialog that allows you to choose where to extract the product.

The "release" version of the executables is found under /bin and the diagnostic version under /dbg. The release version has much of the code used for debugging excluded, making the code faster with fewer runtime instructions, but providing little diagnostics if something goes wrong. Some customers run the debug version in their test environment and the release version in their production environment. Other customers run the diagnostic (/dbg) code in both test and production because they see little difference in performance on their systems.

The /bnd directory contains the DBRM module to Bind when applying to Db2.

The .zip files for each version will remain in the installation directory along with their corresponding version numbered directory structure, facilitating both upgrade and regression testing.

A symbolic link should be created to the executable directory of the current version. When new maintenance is applied, do not remove the old directories; just install the new version (which will create a new directory with a new version number) and update the link to point to the new location. Any scripts or PATH variables that need to reference the location of executables can use this symbolic link and thus not be version specific.

>mklink /d \<SQDATA_DIR>\bin \<SQDATA_DIR>\sqdata-<version>\bin\dbg

Precisely recommends that you run the application without fully qualifying executables by adding the symbolic link created in the last step to your PATH environment variable. Append the link to the existing PATH variable as follows:

>set PATH=%PATH%;\<SQDATA_DIR>\bin 

This setting will only affect the current logged on user. If you would like to maintain this behavior for all new sessions, a system administrator can alter the PATH variable for an individual or all users by updating the system's Environmental Variables. This is also required if you choose to run the sqdaemon product component as a "Service". Each version of Windows has a slightly different path of clicks and Tabs to get to the Environment variables which is another reason why we suggest using a link to the bin directory. Once the environment variable is set to the symbolic link, the contents of the directory can change, but the PATH to the directory will not.

Various environment variables can be used by Connect CDC (SQData). For example, if an Engine will Apply to Oracle, the environment variables ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_HOME need to be populated.

If an Engine will Apply to Oracle, the environment variables ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_HOME need to be populated. If an Engine will Apply to Db2/LUW (UDB), the environment variable DB2_INSTANCE needs to be populated by sourcing db2profile. Connect CDC (SQData) will use this information, together with the standard install locations for each product, to find and load the necessary drivers and libraries. If the products are not installed in a standard location, Connect CDC (SQData) looks for specific environment variables to override the defaults. For example, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to find ODBC drivers. Usually, only database specific environment variables need to be populated as described above.

Environment variables can be set when a session starts by altering the sqdata_user profile. For example, to set the ORACLE_SID to "sqdata", add "SET ORACLE_SID=sqdata" to the user's Environment variables.

The installation can now be verified by simply typing in the module name of interest at the command line. Generally, if you provide the module name without any arguments or provide either --help, -V, or -h, information about the product such as the command line syntax and/or version information is displayed. It is a good idea to run the following command from the command line to verify that the PATH variable has been updated correctly and that you are running the expected version of the code:

>sqdata -V