infoCorvus | Performance Archiving for PeopleSoft Enterprise

Many companies with PeopleSoft Enterprise wait far too long to implement data management strategies for their application databases. Reactive approaches are typically much more costly and difficult to implement. The proper data management strategy in your Oracle environment can help you with application performance, long-term compliance, manageability, application retirement, and infrastructure costs.

A Complete Platform

Structured Data Manager provides a complete data management platform for databases supporting PeopleSoft Enterprise environments with design-time and a run-time environment, each optimized for their distinct functions. Designer provides a visual modeling environment to rapidly define and customize table relationships and refine business rules for data eligibility

The run-time consists of a data movement engine and job control environment with support for Linux®, and Windows operating environments. The database server can be on a separate platform. The server run-time also provides native database integration and is highly scalable to meet demanding high volume PeopleSoft environments. With Structured Data Manager, you have the option and flexibility to either move data from database to database or database to or both in sequence, depending on your data aging strategy, retention policies, and long-term compliance requirements.

The platform also provides rapid installation and configuration, for ease of testing the data movement and archive access capabilities. The management console provides a single location to configure and tune the environment setting for performance and scalability without coding. Additional platform capabilities include automated restart/recovery, pause/failure consistency, job monitoring, job launching, and repository logging for audit trail purposes.

Ready-to-Run Modules

Structured Data Manager for Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise comes with complete, ready-to-run archive modules that correspond to the major PeopleSoft business applications. The modules have been pre-engineered and tested to comply with PeopleSoft business rules and processes to make sure data and application integrity. Each module consists of:

Predefined relationships among most tables comprising each business transaction

Complete business rule definitions to determine data eligibility and status

Installable run-time modules that are ready to run in PeopleSoft environments

Project file definitions for importing into infoCorvus Designer to perform data analysis, customizations, and testing

Structured Data Manager ready-to-run modules address the major business areas in the PeopleSoft Enterprise, including but not limited to Asset Management, Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Order Management, and Payroll

Customization Support

The Structured Data Manager platform is delivered with Designer, a powerful tool for rapidly creating new archive modules that may be unique to your PeopleSoft environment or for extending any of the infoCorvus prebuilt modules. In either case, Designer provides robust capabilities to accelerate your PeopleSoft application archiving implementation and manage the ongoing deployment. Designer project files are pre-engineered for PeopleSoft business areas and delivered in a “locked” state to allow customization tracking.

You can add custom tables by simply locating the table in the schema browser and dragging onto the Designer canvas. The table can automatically be labeled and documented as a custom table. In addition, you can place customization rules on standard PeopleSoft or custom tables and are enforced during the archive process. If PeopleSoft business rules are too restrictive or do not match your business process, they can be turned off. Any standard rules and/or tables that are removed from the archive process remain in the visual model and marked as deleted so customizations can be tracked and documented.

Designer allows you to use Preview to query the database directly to test sample data sets for eligible and ineligible status. This provides rules and customization checking before running archive jobs on the server. You can also customize the archive jobs to meet your requirements. In Designer, Business Flows provide a visual diagram of the job steps to be executed. Custom job steps or actions can be placed in or around the delivered Business Flows. For example, you may want an archive job to pause after the archive selection step or call on an external program.

Archive Access

The success of any archive project can be directly linked to the level of archive access provided. Higher levels of access result in higher volumes of data to archive. However, if archived data is not accessible, typically only the oldest, least useful data is archived, which reduces the performance benefits of archiving. Maintaining an inaccessible archive all but guarantees that only extremely old data (e.g., older than 10 years) can be archived. Structured Data Manager helps balance these approaches to help you meet your unique business needs by offering a range of access options to configure your application archiving environment with retention and access levels that work for you.

Data can be archived to an archive database. Figure on left shows the access options with Structured Data Manager. Data that is archived to a secondary archive database remains accessible from standard PeopleSoft reports as well as custom reports/queries. You can also take advantage of Combined Reporting to allow viewing of current and archived data from a single page or report. This leverages your investment in PeopleSoft and requires little or no user retraining.

Policy Compliance

Because archived data is available for query and report access, you can set retention policies accordingly. Structured Data Manager is designed to provide a flexible, configurable interface for setting up data retention policies and enforcement during the archival process. For example, your company policies may mandate retaining financial (General Ledger) data for the current and past years in the production database. Closed (fulfilled) purchase orders only need to be retained for the past six months.

Through strict adherence to PeopleSoft Enterprise processes and data manipulation guidelines, the infoCorvus application archiving solution certifies that relationships between data and applications remain intact. The delivered archive modules are defined with the same business and functional constraints as the PeopleSoft application. Each module undergoes rigorous testing to verify that data relocation does not affect application functionality or the end-user experience. In addition, the Structured Data Manager solution has undergone PeopleSoft Integration Validation testing and has received approval that data integrity is preserved throughout the archiving process.

In addition to providing ready-to-run archive modules, deployment time is accelerated through the use of configuration parameters that allow you to optimize data management processes to match the specifics of your application and database environment.

Configuration parameters can be easily adjusted in the management console without coding. Simply adjust the configuration parameters to meet your environment-specific situation, according to the PeopleSoft modules deployed. For example, you can define the PeopleSoft modules deployed along with
data retention policies simply by inputting or overriding parameter values.

Because it is often necessary to reuse archived data, Structured Data Manager provides built-in reload capabilities to safely relocate archived data by individual transactions or complete batch runs to the production database. Audit trail information is automatically updated to reflect the reload.

Application and Data Integrity

One of the key challenges of archiving application data is understanding the nature of the data itself. Data may be “stuck” in the system even though it is old enough and appears eligible for database archiving. Complex inter-relationships in application data can make it difficult to discover root causes. To address this issue, infoCorvus provides Eligibility Analytics which includes a robust framework to discover eligible and ineligible business transactions as well as any inter-related transactions, sometimes known as chains.

Eligibility Analytics reporting shows transaction details that allow business users to respond from within the PeopleSoft application and update transaction statuses accordingly. These are invaluable capabilities for data cleanup efforts and to drive up the archival eligibility “yield” for application transactions.

We provide PeopleSoft patch and upgrade support for database-to-database archiving deployments. In rare cases, PeopleSoft patches can alter tables that are managed by archive processes. Structured Data Manager has built-in mechanisms to detect schema changes and synchronize the production and archive schemas. infoCorvus also provides upgrade support, so you can keep pace as Oracle introduces major versions of PeopleSoft Enterprise.

Tools and services are available to migrate archived data to the next version of PeopleSoft Enterprise, which enables you to rely on your current PeopleSoft release for both production and archive access and decrease the costs of managing legacy PeopleSoft versions.

The infoCorvus Advantage

Structured Data Manager for PeopleSoft Enterprise helps you to seamlessly implement
proactive data management strategies. We deliver a broad range of coverage with “readyto-run” archiving modules. Data distribution and growth analysis reports can help identify the right mix of archive modules for your PeopleSoft environment. Structured Data Manager key differentiators:

Combined access to archive and current data in a single report/query

Integration with PeopleSoft Enterprise security using specialized archive responsibilities

Transparency layer generation and management

Ability to archive with users on the system

Automated change management to synchronize with PeopleSoft patches

Reload of data back to production tables as required