Referential Integrity on Service Center 5

Hi,

There is no RI in an default system. the best way to implement this would be through the built in tools that peregrine provides. This would be very time consuming for the whole product and therefore the area of concern should be specified. Why do you question the agents ?

Actually, I found it difficult to believe that Peregrine SC did not have some form of data integrity. File system design was abandoned decades ago primarily due to data inconsistencies and update effort. In addition, it seems as though not many people have an issue with the fact that data integrity is not standard, which is a massive surprise to me.

In terms of the agents, I think they are pretty clued up with respect to SC however, there is no harm in establishing that what they say is valid.

I see that you are a programmer working on SC. Has integrity not been an issue on your implementation on SC, especially relating to update anomalies? If reporting is performed with inconsistent data, the reports will yield variable results depending on the criteria you use in the 'where' clause of the query e.g. company, company_id, company_code etc.

Yes, Integrity has been an issue at other customers and that is why they put processes in place to deal with this, i.e. who has access to the support data inside SC so that data anomolies aren't created. Also, The SC developer has always been in close contact with the Report developer to assist in what data to extract from which fields.

Some of my clients handle integrity by putting processes in place and making use of data administrators to ensure that data are always valid. However this is a manual process which is very time consuming.

At other clients we used the tools supplied by Peregrine to build referential integrity into the sysem, but as pietie said it would be very time consuming to build it into the entire system, therefore you should identify the areas of concern and concentrate on those.

Although building referential integrity into the system was more expensive in the short term, the clients preferred this option as it eliminated an extra headcount in the long term

ServiceCenter 5.1 has something called the "The Cascade Update Utility". The function of this utility is to "allow Administrators to maintain database integrity and consistency by altering the data in one or more dependent files to match changes made to data in a source file".

[Above quotation is from the System Tailoring manual for SC5.1, Volume 2]

I want to repeat that this utility exists first in the 5.1 version of SC, so do not try to find it in any earlier version (including 5.0).

cheers,

JJ