6 Frequently Asked Questions

The following issues may be encountered while implementing Retail Data Extractor. The accompanying solutions will help you work through the issues.

Issue:
Why the extract program performance is not improving even after using ODI multi-threading?

Solution:
This can occur because of several reasons. Check the following settings:

• The number of threads must be appropriate for the hardware and data volume.

• The number of partitions on the intermediate temp table must be equal to or higher than the number of threads.

Issue:
Does Retail Data Extractor only expect one RDWT file for sales from Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA)?

Solution:
The ReSA batch generates the RDWT file based on store day level. It always generates one RDWT file per store/day. The ReSA batch module saexpdw.pc is used to fetch all corrected sale and return transactions that do not have Retail Data Extractor errors from the ReSA database tables for transmission to Oracle Retail Data Extractor. The data will be sent at the store day level.

However, Retail Data Extractor expects only one RDWT file per day. Therefore, the customer has to consolidate all the stores RDWT files for a day into one RDWT file before loading to Retail Data Extractor.

Issue:
How do you execute the failed threads for multi-threading programs?

Solution:
This can be done by using the batch log in the C_LOAD_DATES table. Table C_LOAD_DATES has a record for the execution status of each batch at thread number level. Same thread of a same batch cannot be executed twice unless the log record is deleted manually. This provides a possibility to re-execute only one thread for a case when only one thread fails and other threads complete successfully. To re-execute failed threads, the user can manually delete the threads that need to be executed and keep all other threads untouched in the C_LOAD_DATES table. Then the user can start the batch again. When the re-execution is done, the program will show errors in the UNIX console, but the threads that need to be re-executed should complete successfully. The error in the UNIX console is for the re-execution of the threads that completed successfully in the first execution, so it can be ignored.

Issue:
While running the packages it is possible that there could be a scenario failure with error "Variable has no value" due to ODI out of memory.

Solution:
If this error occurs, verify the values of the following two parameters are set as below (for more details refer to the Oracle Retail Data Extractor Administration Guide) and regenerate the scenario that is failing.

• ODI_INIT_HEAP=256M

• ODI_MAX_HEAP=1024M