Assuming you are using on of the JBoss platforms, running Guvnor for the first time will create a database in the bin/ directory of the application server. There will be a repository.xml file, and a repository directory that are automatically created.

The location of the data store should be a secure location, that is backed up. The default location may not be suitable for this, so the easiest way is to set a more suitable location. If you want to change this, please make sure you have stopped Guvnor (i.e. stopped the app server or un-deployed the application).

To change the location, unzip the WAR file, and locate the components.xml file in the WEB-INF directory. This is a JBoss Seam configuration file (Seam is the framework used) which allows various parts of the system to be customized. When you have located the components.xml file, you should see something like the following:

<component name="repositoryConfiguration">

   <!--

   *** This is for configuring the "home" directory for the repository storage. the directory must exist. ***

   <property name="homeDirectory">/home/michael/RulesRepository_001</property>

   -->  

   ...

</component>

Find the component with a name of repositoryConfiguration and the property with the name of homeDirectory.

If you un-comment this (as in the example above it is commented out), you can set whatever path you need for the repository data to be stored in. You can also use this to move the repository around. In that case, when you have set the location in the components.xml you can simply move the repository.xml AND the repository directory to the new location that you set in the components.xml.

If there is no repository at the location specified (or in the default location) then Guvnor will create a new empty one.

There are many more options which can be configured in the repository.xml, but for the most part, it is not recommended to change the defaults.

In some cases it may be a requirement that you use an external RDBMS, such as Oracle, MySQL, or Microsoft SQL Server as the data store - this is permitted. In this case, the easiest thing to do is to start up Guvnor with defaults (or with a suitable home directory as specified above) to let it generate the default repository.xml.

Locate the repository.xml file that was generated, and open it - it will be annotated with comments describing many of the different options. From here on, you will need to know a little about Jackrabbit Persistence managers, http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/PersistenceManagerFAQ.

There are a few persistence managers, some are database specific (eg Oracle). There is a SimpleDBPersistenceManager which works with any database that supports JDBC - you also specify the database type, so it uses the specific DDL to create the table structure (all major databases are supported).

Guvnor will create the tables the first time it is started up if it is running against a fresh (empty) RDBMS - so its important to note that the user credentials supplied have permissions to create tables (at least initially, on first run, after that they could be locked down).

Jackrabbit has a separate storage area for version storage (as over time, the number of old versions will increase, yet it should not slow down the performance of the main data store). The version storage also has its own persistence manage configuration in the repository.xml, but for most purposes you can use the same database as the main storage (just with a different schema object prefix - ie in your database, all the version data will be prefixed with version_ but otherwise in the same tablespace). See the repository.xml for more details of this.

Lucene is used to provide indexing across the semi structured data, and across versions. This indexing is generally best stored on a filesystem, local to Guvnor (as per the default in the repository.xml) - in most cases the default is fine.