Operational Database

The Operational Database is a core component of the SCOM architecture used to store all the data of the Management Group.

Description
The Operational Database is hosted on a SQL Server Database instance. It is accessed by the Management Server of a SCOM platform to write and store the data.

It is used to host different types of data:
 * Configuration data and settings of the Management Group.
 * Management Packs imported in the Management Group.
 * Monitoring data collected on the monitored objects (Alerts, Performance, configuration).

Structure
The number of tables in the database can attain a large number (around one hundred or more). The table are organized automatically to store data depending on the aggregation.

Considerations
Considering the amount of data collected by SCOM in the organization environment, it is common to find operational databases reaching size of a few hundreds gigabytes. However due to the solution functioning, a large operational database would experience reduced performance. Resulting in a slow experience for users working on the Operations Console and errors happening in the event logs during database intensive maintenance like grooming.

An informal rule of thumb is known in the community to try to keep a database size under 40GB. This goal can be achieved by reducing the Database Grooming settings in the Operations Console.