One of the most common issues in implementations of Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products is the growth of To Do object.
The To Do object is to catch errors or events that need human intervention and cannot be addressed by the logic in the product. Basically something has to be done by someone to correct something as part of the process.
The To Do goes through various states and ends up Completed in its final state. There may be a few steps in between but eventually all To Do's should end up in a Completed state. Now when a To Do is in a completed state, the work associated is essentially completed so the retention of that To Do is a s long as your business wants to retain that data.
In terms of management there are a number of techniques that can be used to decide what to do with Completed To Do's:
- You can use the ILM solution provided with most of the products to retain the To Do as long as your business requires to refer back to it.
- You can use the To Do Purge batch job (F1-TDPG) to remove Completed To Do's. This job can be used globally or by To Do Type. This is the most common approach.
If you use the To Do Purge job then there are a few guidelines to optimize its use:
- If there are a large number of completed To Do's to purge initially, then consider setting the noOfDays to a chunk of To Do's to efficiently to remove them.
- You can set the scope of the job with a combination of isDeleteAll, deletedToDoTypes and excludedToDoTypes. This allows you to set different retention rates for each To Do Type.
- You can copy the Batch control to implement different job conditions.
- Schedule the purge jobs regularly to maintain a healthy balance between retention and storage costs.
Maintaining the To Do table has an impact on almost any part of the product as it is used by almost every process (directly or indirectly).