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Administrating MarkLogic Server

Creating a Forest

To create a new forest, follow these steps:

  1. Click Forests in the left menu tree. A list of forests appears.

  2. Click the Create tab at the top right. The Create New Forests page appears.

  3. Enter the name of your forest in Forest Name. Each forest name must be unique.

  4. Select the host on which you want the forest to be created.

  5. Enter the path to the Data Directory, which specifies where the forest data is stored:

    • MarkLogic recommends that you use an absolute path if you specify a data directory. If you do not specify an absolute path for the data directory, your forest will be created in the default data directory.

    • This directory should specify a location on the host’s file system with sufficient capacity to store your data.

    • The name of the forest is used by the system as a directory name. Therefore, the forest name must be a legal directory name and cannot contain any of these 9 characters: \ * ? / : < > | " . Additionally, the name cannot begin or end with a space or a dot (.).

    • The directory you specified can be an operating system mounted directory path, it can be an HDFS path, or it can be an S3 path. For details on using HDFS and S3 storage in MarkLogic, see Disk Storage Considerations in the Query Performance and Tuning Guide.

    • The Forests directory is either a fully-qualified pathname or is relative to the Forests directory, set at installation time based on the directory in which MarkLogic Server is installed. The following table shows the default location Forest directory for each platform:

      Platform

      Program Directory

      Microsoft Windows

      C:\Program Files\MarkLogic\Data\Forests

      Red Hat Linux

      /var/opt/MarkLogic/Forests

      Mac OS X

      ~/Library/Application\ Support/MarkLogic/Data/Forests

      or

      ~/Library/"Application Support"/MarkLogic/Data/Forest

      or

      "~/Library/Application Support/MarkLogic/Data/Forests"

  6. If you want to specify a different directory to store large objects (such as large binary documents), specify a directory in the Large Data Directory field. If you do not specify a large data directory, the directory specified in the Data Dictionary field is used. For details on binary file support, see Working With Binary Documents in the Application Developer’s Guide.

  7. If you want to specify a high-performance directory to store the journals and as much of the forest data that will fit in this high-performance directory, specify a Fast Data Directory. For further details on disks and the Fast Data Directory, see Disk Storage Considerations in the Query Performance and Tuning Guide.

  8. If you want to restrict the types of updates allowed on the field, select the types of updates you want to allow for this forest in the Updates Allowed field. See Making a Forest Delete-Only for details.

    Note

    The Read-Only update types described in Making a Forest Read-Only can be set in the Configure page of an existing forest.

  9. In the Availability field, select online to make the forest data available to tiered-storage or offline to make the data unavailable. For details on tiered storage, see Tiered Storage.

  10. In the Rebalancer Enable field, specify whether or not you want this forest to participate in the rebalancer process for the database to which this forest is to be attached. For details on the database rebalancer, see Database Rebalancing.

  11. If you have enabled the database rebalancer with a document assignment policy of Range, specify the range for this forest in the Range field. For details on the range policy, see Range Assignment Policy.

  12. In the Failover Enable field, specify whether or not to failover this forest to another host if the primary host goes down. For details on configuring failover on a forest, see Configuring Shared-Disk Failover for a Forest in the Scalability, Availability, and Failover Guide.

  13. Select the Failover Host from the Failover Host Name drop-down menu.

  14. Click OK.

Creating a forest is a “hot” admin task; the changes take effect immediately. However, toggling between update types restarts the forest.