Optimizing Point Block Updates

For Assign Points actions, the points are associated with point blocks. A point block is a set of points assigned to the host company or a partner. Point blocks determine if a host company or partner can give reward points to members. Typically, there is one point block for the host and also one point block for each partner. In other words, the number of point block records is small.

This fact means that in a deployment that has multiple processes running on multiple servers, all threads that process transactions update one or a few records, slowing the performance and limiting the scalability of the Siebel Loyalty Engine.

Two system preferences are available to solve this issue and optimize performance. By default, these system preferences are not defined and do not take effect.

This optimization is available only for the batch mode components. It is not applicable to the real-time components.

Note: Point blocks for the server process are automatically created by the batch processing engine when you optimize performance in order to minimize the number of updates to point blocks during Loyalty Batch Engine processing.

To optimize point block updates

1. Navigate to the Administration - Application screen, System Preferences view.

2. Enter a value for one or both of the two system preferences described in the following table.

   System Preference	Description
   LOYPointBlockBatchSize	If specified, then this value must be a number greater than 0. It indicates that the Siebel Loyalty Engine must batch the point block updates and apply it to the point block only after this many transactions have been processed.
   LOYPointBlockBatchPercent	If specified, then this value must be a number greater than 0 and less than 100. As the available balance in the point block record becomes low, batching the updates can result in more points being assigned to members than are actually available. In order to prevent this problem, this value effectively turns off the batching for the point block records whose remaining balance is less than the specified percentage value. For other point block records, it uses the batching mechanism.