# Document Tracking Back Ends

This section describes some additional information about the main document tracking back-end stores that you can use.

## ODBC Database

Micro Focus strongly recommends that you set up document tracking to use the IDOL document tracking library for ODBC, and an SQL database, which is ideal for this kind of data. This library can interact with an ODBC-compliant driver and database back end.

The information is roughly arranged as follows:

- a table of Event IDs and DocTrackUIDs

- a table of extra information for each Event ID (for example, IndexIDs and warnings)

- a table relating DocTrackUIDs to IDOL references

For information about the schema for the back end, and instructions on how to set it up correctly, refer to the IDOL Server Administration Guide.

## Log

The Log back end is very easy to set up. However, it has some significant disadvantages:

- There is no central log file across components. You must manually collect and combine data from each component to get information for the whole indexing system.

- Information in the log files is hard to read, and you might require a lot of post-processing to get more value from the information.

- You cannot easily deduplicate data.

  In the document tracking UID to document reference mapping, each mapping pair is unique. When using a ODBC-SQL back end, both the DLL and the SQL engine enforce this uniqueness. The DLL does not commit duplicate data, and the SQL engine does not accept it.

Micro Focus recommends using the logging back end only for troubleshooting or other short-term investigative procedures.

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