Install Data Studio on Windows

The installer can be run silently from the command line using the following switches:

• /exenoui: Launches the installer exe without a UI
• /qn: Set the UI level to no UI

Locations for the data folders and the address validation component can be set from the command line using the following parameters:

To perform an upgrade the parameter AI_UPGRADE="Yes" can be used.

New install example

"Experian Aperture Data Studio 2.3.9 Setup.exe" /exenoui /qn DIRNAME_DATA="C:\DATA" DIRNAME_LOG="C:\LOG"
This will install Data Studio silently, setting the DIRNAME_DATA and DIRNAME_LOG directories.

Upgrade example

"Experian Aperture Data Studio 2.3.9 Setup.exe" /exenoui /qn AI_UPGRADE="Yes"
This will upgrade Data Studio from a previous version, using the same configuration settings.

By default, the amount of memory Data Studio can use (more accurately, the initial and maximum heap size) is set at runtime based on system configuration. In most cases, this is suitable for both development and production instances.

In come scenarios you many want to modify memory settings to optimize the resources available and to obtain consistent behavior. Memory settings may need to be further tuned based on the results observed once in use with the production data, users and regular workload.

We recommend that no more than 50% of the available RAM on the server is dedicated to Data Studio. Using more may impact the performance and stability by restricting resources available for the operating system and file system cache.

To add custom memory settings, edit the Aperture Data Studio Service 64bit.ini file in the installation directory. Use the Virtual Machine Parameters setting to modify memory settings. For example, to set both the initial and the maximum heap to 32GB, add the following arguments at the end of the Virtual Machine Parameters line: -Xms32G -Xmx32G. The result will be similar to:

    Virtual Machine Parameters=-XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore="C:\ApertureDataStudio\certificates\cacerts" -Xms32G -Xmx32G

Where -Xms is the minimum amount of heap space the process will use, -Xmx is the maximum. These are followed by the amount of memory to be used as a whole integer and either M or G. M is megabytes and G is gigabytes.

The Data Studio service will need to be restarted after these changes are made.

The metadata repository is the main underlying database that stores all information in Data Studio other than the actual data being processed. This includes users, environments, workflows, functions, datasets (only the metadata not the data itself) and views.

The repository is a SQLite relational database which stores the metadata information for all environments in your Data Studio instance. This consists of a single file, the repository.db, located in the \data\repository folder in the database root directory.

Backups of this repository are configured by modifying the repositories.json file which can be found in the installation root directory.

The default file will look as follows:

[ {
  "id" : "5f3b8528-49d5-4a05-802e-c5437468126b",
  "name" : "Default",
  "datastoreType" : "SQLITE",
  "directory" : "C:\\ApertureDataStudio\\data\\repository",
  "filename" : "repository.db",
  "backupOptions" : {
    "enabled" : false,
    "intervalInMinutes" : 2,
    "backupHistoryIntervalInMinutes" : 1440,
    "maxHistoricBackups" : 7,
    "backupOnStartup" : true
  }
} ]

To configure backups, change the "enabled" setting to true.

    "enabled" : true,

The Data Studio service will need to be restarted after these changes are made.

When backups are enabled, two levels of backup will be created.

1. An active backup will be taken every intervalInMinutes and will be placed in a file called repository-backup.db alongside the original repository.
2. Historic backups will be taken of the active backup every backupHistoryIntervalInMinutes and placed into a backup folder within the repository folder. The default is to backup once a day. The most recent historical backup will be named repository-backup-current.db.

When replicating for disaster recovery it is safe to backup the files within the \repository\backup folder. The active repository.db and repository-backup.db files should not be copied as they are being actively written to.

Aperture Data Studio logging

Log4j 2 can be configured using the log4j2.xml file found in your installation directory.

The logging configuration file is made up of two main sections. Appenders define where log information is written to.

1. This defines the appender to use to be a RollingFile appender.
2. The file logs will be written to is named datastudio.log in the configured Data Studio log folder.
3. This is the pattern for archived log. In this case a folder will be created for each month with a compressed archive created with the date as part of the file name. The archive extension can be changed to zip if required.
4. This defines the pattern the log messages will take. See log4j2 documentation for details.
5. This defines the policies causing a file rollover to occur. In the default logging they will rollover after they reach 250MB or once a day.
6. Lastly this defines how many rollover files should be retained. More than 20 in this case will cause the oldest to be deleted.

The Logger section defines what information gets written.

The log levels available to use are trace, debug, info, warn or error. The default log configuration is set to log informational level events, however this should be raised to warning or error in production to avoid large log files.

Find duplicates logging

Find duplicates also uses Log4j 2 for logging. The log4j2.xml file can be found in the Tomcat webapps directory Tomcat x.x/webapps/match-rest-api-x.x.x/WEB-INF/classes.

By default Find duplicates is configured to log error messages only, apart from the following cases.

1. The REST API will log warning messages to the findDuplicates.log file
2. Standardize will log warning messages to the findDuplicates.log file
3. The core matching engine will log warning message to the findDuplicatesCore.log file.

By default the Data Studio server serves on port 7701 and includes a self-signed certificate to support secure HTTPS connections.

In many cases a certificate signed by a trusted certificate authority (CA) should be applied to the server to enable encryption of client-server communications and appropriately identify your server to clients.

To add an SSL certificate to the keystore and configure Data Studio to use the default HTTPS port (443):

1. Log in with a user that has Manage Communication Settings capabilities (typically an administrator), and browse to Settings > Communication.
2. Change the REST web server TCP/IP port to 443 (or your desired port).
3. Turn on Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
4. Enter server certificate file location information:
   • Key file: Upload the private key used to generate the certificate (for example a .pem or .key file).
   • Certificate file: Upload the CA's certificate chain (for example .pem or .crt file). If you have root and intermediate certificates in separate files, combine these first.

     For certificate files which include both certificate and private key, such as .pfx, the same file should be used for both the Key file and Certificate file.

   • Key passphrase: The pass phrase with which the key file (or combined certificate and key file) has been encoded.
5. Click Save and restart the Data Studio server for the settings to take effect.

The Data Studio database is made up of a number of different folders, which by default are all located under the database root directory.

Most of the database folder locations can be configured during installation. To change them after installation time:

1. Navigate to the installation folder (by default C:\Program Files\Experian\Aperture Data Studio {version}) and open the server.properties file.

2. On a new line in the file, add the setting you want to modify:

   Setting name	Default value	Description
   DirName.ROOT	C:/ApertureDataStudio
   DirName.DATA	%ROOT%/data
   DirName.REPOSITORY	%DATA%/repository	Contains the metadata repository, and backups if backup is configured.
   DirName.IMPORT	%ROOT%/import	Contains files that can be loaded from the server's import directory. Files in sub-folders will be available.
   DirName.EXPORT	%DATA%/export	Contains files exported to the server's export directory.
   DirName.LOG	%DATA%/log	Contains server log files.
   DirName.TEMP	%DATA%/temp	Contains temporary files.
   DirName.TEMP_WORKFLOWREPORT	%TEMP%/workflowreport	Contains temporary files.
   DirName.TEMP_FILEUPLOADS	%TEMP%/fileuploads	Contains temporary files.
   DirName.CACHE	%DATA%/cache	Contains caches generated by workflow steps.
   DirName.CACHE_STEP	%CACHE%/step	Contains caches generated by custom workflow steps.
   DirName.RESOURCE	%DATA%/resource	Contains all loaded data and indexes created during workflow execution indexes or during interactive data exploration.
   DirName.DRIVERS_JDBC	%ROOT%/drivers/jdbc	The location of JDBC drivers used for External System connections.
   Dataset.dropzone	%DATA%/datasetdropzone	Contains dataset-specific file dropzones.

For example, to change the location of the database root directory to the D:\ drive, the entry in server.properties should be:

DirName.ROOT=D:\\aperturedatastudio

To change the location of the export directory to a network location using the UNC path, the setting should be similar to:

DirName.EXPORT=\\\\myfileserver.myorg.local\\datastudio\\fileexports

If you're changing DirName.ROOT, DirName.DATA or DirName.REPOSITORY you need to ensure that the path to the repository.db file is also changed in the repository.json file. This file is located in the same folder as the server.properties file.

To configure Data Studio to write to a network drive, use the full UNC path and make sure that the account running the Data Studio Database Service (by default the Local System account) has write access to the network drive folder location. Only DirName.IMPORT, DirName.EXPORT and Dataset.dropzone are suitable options for network locations.

The Data Studio service will need to be restarted for changes to take effect.

To encrypt Data Studio resources at-rest on the storage medium:

1. Go to Settings.
2. Click Security.
3. Scroll down and enable Use encryption.
4. Click Save to confirm the changes.

Resources are files that can be found in the 'data/resource' folder. They can be loaded Datasets, Snapshots or caches for some of the Workflow steps (e.g. Address validate). Any resources that could possibly
contain PII data will be encrypted using AES256/GCM and a randomly generated key. The key is itself encrypted and stored in the built-in Aperture Data Studio vault.

For performing domain level validation of email addresses using Data Studio's Validate Emails step, the location of an accessible Domain Name System (DNS) server should be configured.

The default server used is 8.8.8.8, the Google DNS, but network or firewall configuration settings may prevent you from accessing this IP address for DNS.

To check if the default Google DNS server is accessible from the Data Studio server, open a command line console and run:

nslookup experian.com 8.8.8.8

If this is successful, the command will return:

Server:  dns.google
Address:  8.8.8.8
Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    experian.com

If the DNS server is not accessible, the command will report DNS request timed out. In this case:

1. Locate an accessible DNS server. Running ipconfig /all from the command line on the server Data Studio is installed on should return IP addresses for DNS servers that can be accessed.
2. In the Data Studio UI browse to Settings > Workflow steps, and enter an IP in the DNS Servers field.
3. Restart the Data Studio server for the settings to take effect.

Aperture Data Studio supports LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) for SSO (single sign-on) authentication.

Should you wish to configure Data Studio to use either of these methods of authentication as opposed to Data Studio's own internal username/password method of authentication, follow the associated steps.

Before creating any users, you should ensure that the password policy and other security settings enforced by Data Studio meet your security requirements.

To view and change the settings, Browse to Settings > Security:

1. Review and edit the Password policy settings. This defines the standard that users' passwords must reach when using internal authentication.
2. Review the Maximum login attempts, and Account lockout period configuration settings, which control how failed login attempts are handled.
3. Review the Session timeout setting, which controls how long a user session can be inactive before it expires and the user is logged out.
4. To prevent simultaneous logins from multiple devices using the same access credentials, check Restrict one session per user.

If installing Find duplicates in a system for processing more than 1 million records, we strongly recommend following these steps to deploy the Find duplicates server onto a separate instance from Data Studio.

In cases where Find duplicates will not handle large volumes, the Find duplicates server that's embedded with Data Studio can be used, and no separate installation is needed.

If you are licensed for postal address validation, follow these steps to configure Validate addresses.