RPASCE Maintenance

PDS maintenance is a periodic operation that must be performed by the administrator. Many of these operations can improve overall performance of data access operations. This can result in fewer contention issues which improves accessibility.

In addition, many of these operations involve removing data from the PDS when that data is no longer needed by the operations being performed by the PDS. This periodic cleansing serves to remove data from the system and addresses the need to retire data as a part of the data management life cycle. Some of the PDS maintenance tasks that can be performed periodically are:

Purging Unused and Inactive Hierarchy Positions

All measure data within the PDS is stored in either scalar or dimensional measures. As positions are introduced to the hierarchies of the PDS, these positions become available for the storage of measure data. When a position is no longer required by the PDS, it can be purged. This hierarchy purging will result in the measure data associated with the retired positions being cleaned from the PDS.

The purging process is performed via the Load Dimension Data OAT task, which has a purgeAge option that can be used for purging unused hierarchy positions.

Clean Up Old Workbooks

It is possible to list all the workbooks in the application and determine which ones are old. "Managing Workbooks Using wbmgr", found in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide, describes using the option Manage Workspaces to list all the workbooks in the application. From this output, all the old and obsolete workbooks can be found. These old workbooks can be removed using the same Managing Workbooks task. Removing only the workbook and keeping the associated segment can help to rebuild the workbook later using the same selections if required. Segments without their workbooks do not require much space. Alternately, the entire segment can be removed using the Managing Segments task.

Clean Up Old Administration Tasks

The tasks in the OAT dashboard grow over time and take up valuable system resources. It is recommended that an Admin user periodically purge unused admin tasks. The task to perform the purge operation is described in "Purge Tasks from Task Status Dashboard Task", found in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide.

Performance Diagnostic Tool

The performance diagnostic tool contains valuable options to analyze system resources. See "Analyzing Workbook Performance", found in the Oracle Retail Predictive Application Server Administration Guide, regarding how to efficiently find workbooks that can be cleaned up.