Note on data storage

Alpana generally doesn’t replicate data.

Alpana Dashboards, Data Sources and Connections generally don’t contain the data itself. They only contain information on how to query the data sources and prepare the data on the fly.
Each Dashboard contains the definition of the Data Sources and Connections that were created within.

There are some exceptions listed below :

Exceptions

Buffer

A slight exception is the Buffer : for bufferized Connections, the buffer temporarily holds the data from the latest query, but it is flushed on the next refresh.

For details, see the chapter on The data buffer

File-based Connections

For file-based Connections (Excel, CSV, …), Alpana stores a copy of the source file.
This is to allow to continue displaying data even when the original file is not accessible.

When saving a Dashboard.alpd file, the file will contain a copy of all files from the dependent file-based Connections.
So if a dashboard is based only on file data, it can be re-opened in a different environment even without the original files.

When getting data for a file-based Connection, the workflow is :

1. if file exists at location defined in the Connection, query the file
2. else open file embarked withing the Dashboard.alpd file