Unit of Work

The unit of work is the interval of processing that takes place between commit points. All PeopleSoft General Ledger background processes use a functional approach to defining the unit of work. This guideline is the basis for the restart and recovery process. If a program encounters an error during the unit of work interval, the system rolls back all processing to the previous completed unit of work. If a rollback occurs as a subset of the request criteria, this point is indicated on the request record for that background process.

For the Allocations and Year End Close background processes, the unit of work is defined as a subset (a process step) within the request level. The program can successfully complete an allocation step or close a ledger for a fiscal year without completing all the steps or business units specified in the request record. The Year End Close and Journal Posting processes commit the work for each unique ledger and business unit combination. This enables you to continue an interrupted job by starting from the failed business unit. In these cases, several commits could be issued before the request record is updated. For the Consolidations and Equitization process, the unit of work is the same as the request level.

The amount of time required to complete a unit of work is critical when determining which processes can run concurrently. Because this is a function of the data, the nature of the requests, and the database environment, you should run tests of typical units of work to see how long they take in the absence of conflicting processes.