Global Scheduled Services: If You Publish, Will Performance Perish?

P6 users sometimes wonder how often they should publish their enterprise and project data for reporting from Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM (P6). The requirement can be different for each company based on different reporting needs. Generally, the Application Administrator is responsible for setting up publication services. Having your P6 Administrator set the correct Global Scheduled Services options to run at the correct time of day can profoundly impact application performance and the user experience.

Oracle states that the data in the P6 Extended Schema is calculated and stored by Publication Services, which give those with access control over when data is calculated and stored in the P6 Extended Schema. Publication Services exist for both project and global data. Global data includes enterprise data, as well as resource and role, portfolio, and security data. Project data includes all information about projects, including summaries and calculations.

For users this means that Global Scheduled Services can impact what data is updated, and how often the new data entered is available for use in reporting. The P6 Administrator is able to configure Global Scheduled Services, and select when specific types of global reporting data will be published:

• Enterprise Data: Enterprise level business objects containing calculated and denormalized fields, including: cost accounts, currencies, calendars, codes, funding sources, resource teams, role teams, timesheet dates, and user defined fields.
• Enterprise Summary Data: Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) -level spread data for currently published projects in a given EPS.
• Resource Management Data: Resource hierarchy, resources, resource rates, resource limits, role rates, resource role assignments, and resource security.
• Security Data: Users, the OBS, security profiles and security for the P6 extended schema.

From a P6 user perspective, it is important to always have the most up-to-date data available for reporting. Publishing everything as soon as data changes/updates are made would be desirable. However, a P6 Administrator might consider, “at what expense?” Publishing data is taxing on the P6 database and consumes significant resources that can impact users through decreased performance, especially when data sets are large. Understanding what solutions can be put in place to effectively provide up-to-date information, as well as optimal application performance will help provide satisfactory results for everyone.

Whether you are a as user or administrator there are a few questions to be asked before setting (but not forgetting) global scheduled services:

• Will this data need to be reported upon immediately? Or, is this something that the organization can schedule to be run during off-hours when fewer users might be affected?
• How many projects are going to have the service(s) run against them? The size of the database can have a significant impact on the time it takes to run the services and the impact on performance that may be noticeable to users of the application.
• Is it necessary to run all services or just certain key services such as enterprise data and resource data daily, while other services may be run weekly?

As a general rule decisions like this should be made by the Project Management Organization (PMO) to get a well-rounded perspective. When making these decisions, also consider these questions:

• When should we publish our global data? Who will it be impacting if we run it midday vs. evening or midnight?
• How often does it need to be published? Are reports needed hourly, daily or weekly?
• Do we need to prioritize our services to get the best tradeoff?

And let’s not forget that it is possible to publish data for a single project if the situation requires it.

Putting forth the time to make informed decisions up front can save you significant time and result in increased performance within P6. If you are unsure on what you should do, feel free to contact LoadSpring at +1 (978) 685-9715 or visit LoadSpring.com. One of our Project Management experts will work with you to determine what suits your needs best.