Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Peoplesoft SACR security

SACR(Student Administration and Contributer Relations) security is Peoplesoft's way to implement Row Level Security. Using SACR, the Peoplesoft Admin can let the data that is visible to each user.
Though quite to set up but yet it is quite powerful. You can limit what the what students or faculty can see using simple SACR security set up.
You can limit the users to a specific Term, Institution, Acad Career, Campus and number of other parameters.
Navigation is simple enough
Home->set up SACR
Depending upon the requirement, you may secure Student Admissions or Student Financials or some faculty related data.

Have anything specific question? Leave a comment and I would be glad to answer

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

My query runs faster in SQL developer or TOAD?

As a DBA, I have heard this numerous times from my users that my SQL query runs faster in SQL developer or TOAD but it takes a long time when the same SQL query is running in the database or through an application.

There is a very simple explanation for this anomaly. These tools (SQL developer/TOAD) by default run for FIRST_ROWS. This means the goal of these tools is to simply return the first few rows as quickly as possible. Hence, these tools run with an execution plan that returns the first few rows quickly rather than all the data that the query satisfies. However, when the same SQL runs through the application, the goal is to show the complete result data which might be running with a different execution plan.

In order to get the realistic execution time, you should consider increasing the SQL Array Fetch size. Click on Tools-> Preferences-> Database->Advanced Parameters-> SQL Array Fetch Size.
Increase the array size to 1million. Now, when you run your SQL, it should take the same time as the application is taking.

Have a question? Please leave a comment and I would be glad to answer.