SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional supports replicating a vault database that can improve performance in high latency (typically more than 50 milliseconds) and high usage environments.
Administrators can use Always On Availability Groups (AOAG) technology from
Microsoft SQL Enterprise edition 2012 or higher. For details, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff878265.aspx.
For each availability group, AOAG maintains a single read-write primary database and multiple read-only secondary databases. The primary SQL server updates the secondary SQL servers periodically.
SOLIDWORKS PDM Web2 client and Web client cannot take advantage of the secondary database.
You can create the secondary SQL servers over LAN and WAN to the primary SQL server. Using AOAG, SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional can direct the read operations to the secondary SQL server. This improves the performance in the following ways:
- Read operations are directed to the secondary SQL server, significantly reducing the load on the primary SQL server so it can respond faster, and handle more load.
- For read operations, users access the secondary SQL database server instead of accessing the primary SQL database. This speeds up read operations such as browsing through vault folders, and accessing Data Cards, Contains, and Where Used information.
- In case of high latency between the client and primary SQL Server, having a secondary SQL server locally to the client improves the performance for read operations.
It is recommended to use synchronous-commit mode on the secondary SQL servers that have very little latency to the primary SQL server.
All write operations are directed to the primary SQL server. During login, the user is connected to the:
- Primary and secondary SQL servers if the secondary SQL server is reachable.
- Primary SQL server if the secondary SQL server is not reachable. In this case, the primary SQL server handles all database operations for that session.