Preparing the Connect database to send to Black Duck

You might need to send a backup of your Connect database to Coverity support. You have two options for doing so securely:

Remove the source code from the database before sending. Your Support representative can explain how you do that.
Anonymize the database.

This operation, called scrambling, not only removes source code, but destroys all names of items in the database (for example, users, components, and streams), replacing them with small numbers. Because the data is overwritten, there is no way to "un-scramble" a scrambled database.

Scrambling has disadvantages:

It takes longer than removing source.
Depending on the problem that Support needs to diagnose, you might need to work with Support to match a few of the scrambler-generated numbers to their unscrambled names.

Use the scramble subcommand to anonymize your database before sending it to Coverity Support. This command works with all supported Coverity Connect version backups.

Note: The database scramble tool is not supported with Coverity cloud deployments.

The syntax of the scramble command is as follows:

cov-admin-db scramble 
    --input-dump <file_or_dir> 
    --output-dir <output_dir> 
    [--debug]

Use the --input-dump option to specify the name of the input backup file or directory. This is the file you want scrambled. The output of the scrambling operation is a database backup directory, <output_dir>.

The basic workflow is as follows:

Run the cov-admin-db backup command to create a backup of your database.
To avoid impacting the resources used by your production Connect instance, install Connect on a different host. Use the embedded database option when installing.
On the instance installed above, run the cov-admin-db scramble command to scramble the database backup.

The cov-admin-db scramble command takes the file or directory you provide with the --input-dump option, and restores it into a temporary database. It then scrambles information in the temporary database.
The cov-admin-db scramble command then backs up the stripped database to the directory specified by the --output-dir option.
You can now make a tar or zip archive of the <output_dir> directory and send it to Coverity Support.

Note: Like removing source, scrambling takes significant disk space, both for the two backups and for the temporary database. The temporary database will consume the same amount of disk space as the production database.