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Fine-Tuning the Assignment Statement

There are two fields available at the statement level that can be used to fine-tune the performance of Assignment Statements:

• Cache Flag
• Light Parser Flag

For most cases, it is recommended that these fields be left at their default values. It is only necessary to consider changing these values if performance is deemed to be poor.

About the Light Parser Flag

Within your Siebel application, calculation expressions are evaluated using Siebel Query Language Parser. However, this parser could be performance and resource intensive if the expressions are simple numeric. To improve performance, BRP includes a high-performance light parser, used solely to evaluate numeric expressions. In most cases, the light parser works many times faster than the Siebel Query Language for simple numeric.

The following expressions are numeric expressions that can be handled by the light parser:

• 12 + 8 + [A]* [B]
• 5 + (12 + [A]* ([B] + [C]))

The following expressions are considered complex and cannot be handled by the light parser:

• IIf ([A] > [B], 0, 1)
• [A] IS NULL
• LN (10)

When the Light Parser flag is checked, BRP attempts to parse and evaluate the expression first using the light parser. If this fails, BRP resorts to Siebel Query Language engine to parse the expression. By default, Light Parser Flag is checked.

TIP:   If the Light Parser flag is checked but the expression is not a simple expression, at run time, the BRP logs an entry in the log file if the Siebel log level is informational or higher. Use these log entries to help you fine-tune assignment statements. See Logging Business Rules Processor Debug Messages for more information.

About the Cache Flag

If the Cache flag is checked, only one single parse tree is established for the expression within the object manager, irrespective of the number of open sessions. On one hand, when all sessions share the same parse tree, the memory footprint is reduced, however an overhead for context switch is assumed. On the other hand, if the flag is not checked, each session has its own parse tree for the expression. There will be no context switch, but the memory footprint is increased.

It is recommended that you leave this flag to the default value of checked.

NOTE:  The Cache flag is only meaningful when the expression is not handled by a light parser.