Lotus Notes

Lotus File Structure

Notes databases are usually used to hold documents, though they can hold other types of object, such as image, audio and video. As the documents are pretty much free form text, Notes databases are ideal for holding Internet source files.

Other Notes objects are 'Forms', which are used to create new documents, and 'Views' which are used to collate data from several documents.

Views and Forms are typically set up by an application programmer.

Notes looks for all its databases under its default directory. This is usually C:/NOTES/ though it can be changed. The system variable $NOTESDIR stores the root directory name.

This doesn't mean that you have to hold all your databases in that directory, Lotus supports the Unix concept of Virtual Mount Points.

A Directory Link is a text file which has the extension *.DIR It simply contains the pathing information to point to a real directory elsewhere on the server.

A Database Link is a text file which has the extension *.NSF, i.e. its pretending to be a database. All it contains, is the pathing information to a real database
If you select either of these objects from within Notes, it works out the pathing information, and takes you to the real data.

Notes Object Services (NOS) is the glue that holds the Notes components together and Notes Storage Facility (NSF) is the database manager. Lotus Notes is a multi-platform application, it can happily co-exist on several different server platforms in the same organisation, and look like one coherent e-mail application. Some system notes databases are -
names.nsf - contains user, server, group, and asset info
da.nsf contains directory assistance for remote and local directories
dircat.nsf - and extension to the names database, it contains abbreviated user information and is commonly used by mail systems to store info on thousands of users.

The 'note' is the basic Notes data structure. The one single structure is used to simplify multi-platform capability. The Note header contains class (Document, ACL, replication formula, shared field), replication and size information. Notes can be data notes or non-data notes. Data notes, or documents, contain the data content. Non-data notes contain metadata, like access control lists, design views, forms, cross form field definitions, Icons and views. Notes can have child notes, which permits the building of a complex set of documents.
A 'note' is a logical concept. In physical terms different parts of a note can be stored in different physical locations. Notes metadata are all held together in 'summary buckets', to allow rapid searching and view creation. The total summary data for a given node cannot exceed 64K

From Lotus Notes version 7 Notes supports DB2 as a backend data store, even though Notes databases are not relational

Deleting and Copying Documents

Deleting a document from a database is a two stage process. First select the document from a view list, using the space bar. Then hit the 'delete' key on your keyboard. A dustbin, or trashcan will appear in the margin. You can select several documents like this, and the space bar acts as a toggle key, if you press it again, the dustbin disappears. Once you have selected all the documents you want to delete, hit PF9 to delete the documents, and reply YES to the idiot message. Delete will leave a stub file, which is used to clone the delete to the other servers in the cluster. Stub files are cleaned up automatically after a number of days.
Newer versions of Lotus Notes e-mail move deleted documents to a trash folder but the file is not permanently deleted until it is deleted from that folder. There are three types of Notes deletion -

• Fully deleted
• Hard deletion - The document is deleted and is replicated out so all replicants are deleted; no recovery possible
• Soft deletion - The document marked as deleted but can be recovered later if required

When data is deleted from a database the space is left behind as 'whitespace' This space cannot be reused, it must be reclaimed by running the database compactor task.

It is best to determine a limit of how many documents a database can contain, to prevent databases becoming too large. Large databases are more difficult to manage, for backup, restore, searching compressing etc. To prevent databases becoming too large, work out an archiving process which removes inactive documents to a set of archive databases.

You can check the size of your databases by looking at a NOTES system database, NOTES.LOG use File, database, open
Select notes log
Go to databases, sizes view

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