Analytic Servers

The analytic server framework provided by PeopleSoft is a general server infrastructure designed to meet the needs of PeopleSoft products that process large amounts of data in memory. It provides a stateful model of client/server connectivity that these products require to be part of the PeopleTools system, by keeping track of configuration settings, transaction information, and other data for a session. For example, client software could request that an analytic model or optimization model be recalculated in one transaction, then retrieve the results of the calculation on that model at a later time. A server process handles these requests, and maintains the model state and calculated data in memory between the requests. Additional transactions can then modify the model and perform recalculations on it without shuffling all of the data between the client and the server or dumping all the data to a database, thus preserving in-memory performance.

When a program doesn't “maintain state” or when the infrastructure of a system prevents a program from maintaining state, it’s known as a stateless program or system. It can’t take information about the last session into the next session, such as settings the user makes or conditions that arise during processing. All session state is maintained by the client and is transferred to the server with each request. As long as an application server is up and running, a user’s session remains active and functional, and any application server can perform requested transactions.

However, with some products, such as Analytic Calculation Engine or PeopleSoft Optimization Framework, running a calculation on a multi-dimensional model is likely to produce far more data than is reasonable to shuttle between a client and server to maintain a stateless connection. For performance reasons, the calculations are performed completely in memory. If these calculations were to be synchronized and stored in the database so that a stateless connection could be maintained, performance would suffer significantly.