1) Archivematica does indeed use a MySQL/MariaDB database to store data
related to individual microservices / tasks that are performed within the
preservation workflow.  The MySQL database also contains the contents of
the format policy registry.  Specifics about what the database contains can
be found here
<https://wiki.archivematica.org/MCPServer#Database_Schema_Diagram>,
although the contents are most likely out of date.  To the best of my
knowledge, the MySQL database currently needs to reside on the same server
as the rest of the Archivematica installation, although I believe that
Artefactual (Archivematica's principal developer) had ambitions to decouple
it so that the database and Archivematica could live on separate servers.

2) Archivematica places an Archival Information Package (AIP) in some form
of datastore, which can be managed through the storage service console.
Multiple backends are supported, but my group has only ever used filesystem
storage.  Dissemination Information Packets (DIPs) are ideally distributed
via Artefactual's atom <https://www.accesstomemory.org/en/> (caveat, this
is coming from my memory to wit, which might be off; we don't use atom in
our library).  Archivematica/atom together are supposed to implement the OAIS
model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_System>.

My advice regarding Archivematica would be to make sure you have someone
very tech-savy involved who's comfortable with debugging.  There's a lot of
technical debt with the project that can be challenging to deal with
without an IT person or a programmer (unless you hire Artefactual to set it
up for you).  I'd take a look at the user forum
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/archivematica> as well before
making a decision of whether or not to adopt it.  If you do decide to use
it, I would choose a version, install it, iron out all the pain points, and
then stick with that version unless there's a super compelling reason to
upgrade.

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 10:49 AM Kyle Breneman <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Greetings, friendly c4l crew!
>
> We're considering using Archivematica and I have several questions to which
> I cannot find answers.  Hopefully one of you can help me out.
>
> 1) It seems like the individual Archivematica client depends upon a MySQL
> database mounted on a server.  Is that right?
>
> 2) I gather that Archivematica performs several important digital
> preservation tasks, but it doesn't seem that Archivematica is intended to
> be the final destination for the materials themselves.  Is the idea that,
> at the end of the workflow, what they call Dissemination Information
> Packets (DIPs) are routed into a separate repository, such as
> ContentDM/DSpace/ArchivesSpace?
>
> Regards,
> Kyle
>