Topology database properties
Use this information to understand how the NCIM topology database is structured to store data, and support queries and extensibility.
NCIM data storage
The NCIM relational database are divided into core tables and attribute tables. Core tables define all entities within NCIM together with the relationships between these entities. Attribute tables contain attribute data for each entity; they are specific to Network Manager.
NCIM database structure
Base information for the discovered network resources and relationships is held within the entityData table. Resource-specific attribute data is held in product-specific extension tables that typically have a foreign key relationship with the core-model entityData table.
The NCIM topology database also holds meta-data in tables such as the mappings, enumerations, CIDRInfo and deviceFunction tables. You can query this data to get useful, typically human-readable information for device attributes. For example, you can determine the user-friendly name of BGP AS numbers.
The NCIM topology database has been designed to be familiar to users who work with the MODEL database in legacy object-oriented format. This is most apparent in the naming of NCIM relational database tables and fields. Where possible, the naming is the same as that used in MODEL.
Multiple domain queries
NCIM allows multiple network domains to be stored in the database simultaneously. A domain is a scoped set of entities discovered and managed by an application, such as Network Manager.
A single SQL query on the NCIM database can extract data from multiple domains. This is in contrast to Object Query Language (OQL) queries on the Topology manager, ncp_model, topology database, which are able to extract information only from a single domain at a time.
Extensibility
The NCIM topology database can hold additional data that is collected during a customized discovery. For example, discovery stitchers can be configured to look up customer details from a third-party source based on an IP address. It is possible to configure MODEL to populate NCIM with this additional data and to configure NCIM to store this additional data in the form of key-value pairs.
Continuing the example, you might configure NCIM to store a customer name and customer type, associated with each main node entity discovered. It is also possible to modify NCIM to create new multicolumn tables and configure MODEL to populate these tables following a customized discovery. These modifications enable NCIM to store more custom data. For example, you might want to store a set of data on each customer associated with an IP address.