You've rolled out NPM, then SAM and maybe you've added in NCM and VMAN. You are thinking about DPA and NTM/SRM, especially when they are fully integrated into the Orion framework and suddenly you realize that you want (or need!) to know how data is formed for all of those lovely reports you are generating, or you want to be like adatole and make pretty SQL reports and alerts. It doesn't take long before someone asks "Hey, can you make me a report that tells me which nodes are assigned the Widget custom attribute AND are assigned the Widget Watcher SAM template?"
We spend an awful lot of time looking at the database through SSMS. We also work with our performance team so that they can extract certain data for long term archiving (see Jfrazier's idea - https://thwack.solarwinds.com/ideas/2637). Recently, we decided to use the data captured by NPM and VMAN to help us publish the lineage (what is connected to what) for everything from physical to virtual servers, from switches to storage. It is a pretty massive undertaking, but knowing how the data was stored in the DB made it relatively simple.
I suggest that Solarwinds publish a detailed DB schema, especially with the changes coming to the DB in NPM 12, so that we can leverage 3rd party tools to further mash and mangle the data up in other tools and views.
