New Feature: Remote Desktop Manager Repositories and How to Split your Data Source

If your RDM data source contains more than 5000 entries, you may start to experience some slowness and performance issues. In the past, the workaround we advised was to split your data source into multiple sources. The good news is that this fixes the performance issues. The bad news is that you must manage multiple databases and security systems. Well, guess what? We’ve created a much better solution: say hello to Remote Desktop Manager Repositories!

Repositories are essentially compartments in a single database. Instead of handling the whole data source as a single block of data, repositories handle a smaller subset. As a result, you can manage a massive amount of entries as you normally would, but without experiencing diminished performance. And since you aren’t breaking the database up into multiple smaller databases, you can maintain a single set of users, security groups and roles, which cuts down on administration time (and headaches!). Now, you might be wondering how to split your entries, a good example would be one data source for your lab environment and one for your production environment; or let’s say you have offices around the world you could easily split them geographically.

Since I know you’re going to love this new feature as much as I do, let’s take a closer look at how to create Repositories! The first thing to know is that not all data sources support Repositories. Currently, it’s available for SQL Server and for Devolutions Server. Here’s what you need to do:

• From your main data source, select Administration – Repositories- Add Repository.
• Make sure that you’re in the Default Repository, and also make sure that your users, security groups and roles are defined here.
• Create a New Repository. In the example below, I’m calling it “NewRepo”.

Then, create a new data source that connects to the same database. In the Settings tab, click on the ellipsis (“…”) and select your newly created Repository.

And that’s its! You’ll have the same set of users, security groups and roles as you have in your main data source (i.e. the Default Repository). For end users, it will look like a different data source. But for administrators like you, it’s a single data source — which means fast performance, easier management, and no headaches!

Please note that this is a new feature of Remote Desktop Manager 12, but you can already give it a test run by downloading our beta version.  As with all new releases, we recommend testing this in a copy of your production database.

As always, please let us know your thoughts by using the comment feature of the blog. You can also visit our forums to get help and submit feature requests, you can find them here.