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SchemaEditor improvements when dropping columns on Oracle

July 8, 2013   I’ve been recently working with a couple of customers who were dropping database columns from their schema on Oracle, and the drops were taking a long time to complete. In one instance, the customer estimated it would take 50 hours to drop a bunch of columns from their contact table. In another, a customer observed that dropping two columns from table_site_part took over two hours. Dropping 3 columns from table_contact took over 1 hour. These long execution times can disrupt normal operations – especially those environments with limited maintenance windows. Dovetail’s schema editing tool (Schema Editor) and Amdocs schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager) all do the same basic operations when it comes to dropping columns. Basically they all do this: ALTER TABLE table_name DROP COLUMN column_name; There’s a better way. Set Unused On large tables the process of physically…

Deletes (Drops) in SchemaEditor

May 3, 2013 While discussing Dovetail SchemaEditor recently, a question came up around deletes (drops), i.e. How do you delete a column using SchemaEditor, as it doesn’t seem like SchemaScript supports deletes.   First, a little background.   SchemaEditor works with Data Dictionary files and with SchemaScript files.   A Data Dictionary file is a complete reference of the database schema. This is similar to a Clarify complete schema files.   SchemaScript is a simple, imperative way of specifying the changes to be made to the database schema.   A complete schema file (Data Dictionary), because of its size and complexity, can quickly become unwieldy and cumbersome to work with.   Schema Script simplifies the process of schema changes by allowing a user to specify only the changes to be made, as opposed to the complete schema.   However, only adds and updates can be performed using SchemaScript. Deletes are not currently supported.  …

SchemaEditor and OneToOne relations : clearing up a bit of ambiguity

October 22, 2012 Using Dovetail SchemaEditor to add a new relation to your schema is super easy.   For example, here’s my schema script for adding a new one-to-one relation between the modem table and the user table:   What’s nice is that I only have to define the relation once in the schema file, as opposed to other tools (ddcomp, DD Editor, SchemaManager) where I would have to add the relation to the file in two places (as a relation under both the modem table and as a relation under the user table).   But, there is a bit of ambiguity here – which side is the primary side (OTOP) and which side is the foreign side (OTOF)? Answer   The foreign side will be on the table/name, and the primary side will be inverseTable/inverseRelationName.   So in the example above, the modem2user is the OTOF, and…

Dovetail SchemaEditor vs. ddcomp – or – why is ddcomp so slow?

May 2, 2011 While doing some prep for my upcoming webinar on Clarify/Dovetail Schema 101, I started doing some closer looking into what SchemaEditor and ddcomp actually do under the hood.   We’ve had some good reports from customers on how much faster schema changes get applied when using Dovetail SchemaEditor. I knew it as well, but I didn’t really know why. So I put on my Encyclopedia Brown hat and started my investigation. The scenario   My test case was pretty simple: add a new column to the case table. A pretty common scenario. Dovetail SchemaEditor   I ran SchemaEditor, adding a new x_test_integer column. I examined the logs emitted by SchemaEditor, as well as the SQL Profiler trace.   Here are the changes SchemaEditor made to the database:   1. Add the new column to the metadata (adp_sch_info table) INSERT INTO adp_sch_info (…)     VALUES…

How to Include Calculated Data in Query Results

September 19, 2017 I've blogged before about the Filter Config and Filter Overrides within Dovetail Agent. I totally dig this feature, as it makes it super easy to customize the queries within the app without having to write code. We know it's easy to show data that comes from a database column within the query results - such as a contact's name or phone number. But what if we wanted to show something that is more dynamic? i.e. something that needs to be calculated?   For example, in the result set for contact queries, what if we wanted to show the number of open cases that a customer has? There's not an existing field in the database that contains this data. The number of open cases needs to be summed up. So how can we do this in a query? SQL Views to…

Clarify / Dovetail – in the Cloud

December 17, 2015 "The Cloud"Recently, we migrated our Clarify/Dovetail implementation to the cloud. Specifically, into Amazon’s AWS infrastructure.We setup a sandbox environment a couple months ago, and then migrated our production instance this month.As far as I know, we have the only Clarify production implementation running in the cloud.If you navigate to our support site at https://support.dovetailsoftware.com – that’s all running in AWS.We have multiple AWS servers/components in play, as well as some tools that we use, which I’ll cover in more detail here. Application ServerThe app server is Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter edition.No surprise, we run our Dovetail suite of applications, including:Dovetail AdminDovetail AgentDovetail MobileDovetail Agent ReportingDovetail SelfServiceBOLTBootstrapCarrierRulemanagerSeekerSchemaEditorArchiveManager (DIET)In addition, we also have some of our own customizations, including:Custom web servicesCustom Rulemanager actions (mostly Powershell scripts)Custom scheduled tasks (mostly Powershell scripts) Database ServerThe database server is Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter, running  Microsoft…

Clarify Infrastructure Upgrades Continue to Grow in Popularity

January 20, 2015 It’s only natural that legacy Clarify deployments are often supported by outdated or soon to be outdated versions of operating systems and databases.  More and more we’re contacted by clients exhibiting a slight tone of panic in their voices because the database and/or operating system their Clarify CRM software is residing on is soon to be unsupported, leaving them with more questions than answers.  Will our customizations break?  Will our event rules still fire properly?  Will our Outlook version interact properly with legacy Clarify tools after an upgrade?  What the heck are we going to do if something mission critical breaks?  What if our auto-generated customer emails cease to work?  Can you even imagine the increased workload to our support center staff if they have to individually email a follow up to each customer?   Have we waited too long…

Optimized Views

May 31, 2013 Within your Clarify / Dovetail schema, there’s a concept of an Optimized View. This is really an implicit feature of a view, but if you’re aware of it, and understand how they work, you can use it to your advantage.   An optimized view happens when you have a join to a table, but the only field that you’re including from the joined in table is the objid field, and the relation type from the main table to the joined table is a OTOP or MTO.   When these conditions are met, then the schema editing tools (ddcomp, SchemaManager, Dovetail SchemaEditor) will optimize the underlying view, meaning that it will not actually create a join to the table, but instead will simply use the column from the main table as part of the select clause.   That’s a bunch of info…

Automated Deployment for Clarify Example

January 11, 2012 Last year I posted about automated deployments for Clarify. From that post:   Doing automatic deployments of Clarify changes is pretty straightforward. If I was starting off, I would use a contemporary build script tool such as nant or rake, and simply have it call out to your schema editing tool (Dovetail SchemaEditor, or ddcomp) to perform schema changes, use an import tool (such as Dovetail ArchiveManager, or dataex) for importing forms, and then compile your Clearbasic code using CBEX, or just import it as a DAT file using Dovetail ArchiveManager. File copying, registering components, configuring web servers, and setting permissions are all common tasks that are available in these build tools as well.   Should you also need to do additional stuff in your database, some code that uses the Dovetail SDK can be useful.   You could tie this…
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