While IRM and its REST API provide access to many different mechanisms for examining and extracting data, there are cases where the customer would benefit from the ability to access IRM's data via a relational database, such as:
using third party reporting or data analysis tools that is designed to work with a relational database via ODBC, but not with a REST API.
staff are proficient in using SQL to query, analyze, extract or summarize certain data rather than having to use mongo query.
run computationally intensive routines against the SQL database will not impact performance of the production mongodb which might negatively impact performance for other users.
To support these and other use cases, IRM provides the ability to export its data to a relational database. To keep overhead to a minimum, the relational export system must be activated by a user with Admin privileges; it does not run by default. After initial activation, it will take some time for the relational database to be populated. After the initial population, IRM can automatically keep the relational database in sync with ongoing changes to IRM data, subject to a short delay (usually measured in seconds or a small number of minutes).
Occasionally, the relational database may get out of sync. In such an eventuality, it is easy to simply re-populate the relational database from IRM again, starting from scratch.
Details of how to populate relational data, monitor IRM's syncing of data to the relational database, etc. are provided in the IRM Administrators' Guide, in the Maintenance section.
The relational data follows IRM's Object Model as closely as possible. This ER-Diagram and a a solid understanding of the Object Model are beneficial to anyone attempting to work with relational data extracted from IRM.
One of the main featires of the Relational Export feature is to allow users to access the relational DB, so that they can do their own analysis of IRM data and use alternate RDBMS-oriented reporting tools. IRM provides Admin users a way to access the RDBMS, that is, a username and password to access to the SQL Export DB. In addition, IRM provides a mechanism to download a backup of the SQL DB for further processing - via a download link in the Launcher Relational Export tab, plus a button that allows the backup to be re-created:
