When Peoplebooks Is Not Enough
Some people use the term “rounding error” to indicate that an answer is right enough, although not perfectly right. Those people think “accurate” and “precise” are two different concepts. They may be experimental scientists or programmers, but they aren’t working in Accounting. Accountants cannot and should not leave journal entries alone with rounding errors.
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We’re always happy yet apprehensive to get a new bundle of bug fixes for Peoplesoft. We anticipate that our applications will run more reliably, perhaps faster, and maybe with a few new features. The chore that nobody likes, though, is checking for Oracle’s changes that affect the Peopletools objects we have customized.
Continue reading ‘Merging Bundles With Customized Peopletools Objects’ »
Last week I worked on two SQR program bugs. I rewrote the first one from scratch. I wanted to rewrite the second one but didn’t. Here is why.
Continue reading ‘The Rewrite And The Bug Fix’ »
I have nothing against subqueries, but there are times in the Peoplesoft environment that they are unnecessary. If we can get exactly the same results with simpler, faster SQL, let’s avoid subqueries.
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Views are a useful feature of SQL databases, letting us create virtual tables based on SQL select statements. The Peoplesoft Application Designer also lets us create dynamic views, which we may use within the page processor.
Some organizations manage their workforces with positions. A position specifies a job and a place on an organization chart, which can exist without a person or with more than one person. Position management can give organizations more control over their structures, budgeting, and succession planning.
Continue reading ‘Views You Can Use: Position Data’ »
In the ten years that I have been programming in SQR, I’ve found a few cases where the compiler is a bit more limited than the documentation implied. However, I can only think of one example in which SQRW acted in a way that was unambiguously wrong.
Continue reading ‘A Strange SQR Bug’ »
Peoplesoft HCM has tens of thousands of record definitions, representing tables, views, and other Peopletools objects. Nonetheless, we can find more ways to organize our data usefully for easy access in Query Manager or in database browsers like SQLPlus and TOAD. This is the first of an occasional series of posts regarding new ways to access our data. This week: PS_LEAVE_ACCRUAL.
Continue reading ‘Views You Can Use: Leave Accrual’ »
We may be designers and programmers, but we often need to look at the contents of the database to help our customers deal with problems. I probably spend as much time writing SQL select statements in Quest Software’s TOAD (Tools for Oracle Application Developers) as I do writing SQR in SlickEdit. I rarely go beyond the twelve basic keywords (select, from, where, and, or, not, like, exists, order by, group by, in), but there are other syntactical choices. I’m not necessarily recommending them; they may be slower than the more familiar choices.
Last year I wrote about the similarity and superiority of the SQR evaluate command compared to the C or Java switch command in SQR Evaluate Versus C/Java Switch, part 1 and part 2. Here is another way to extend evaluate functionality.
Continue reading ‘Evaluate Two Values At Once In SQR’ »