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Siebel – Merge Records – Checklist

Nitin Jain — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:42:10 +0000

I call this Part III, and concluding part of a series of my posts on the Merge Records functionality in Siebel CRM. You may want to take a look at the previous 2 parts below:
Siebel – Merge Records functionality
Siebel – Automating Merging Records by script – II

Though this looks like a very interesting and useful utility from the face of it, it can be dangerous too.

If you decide to go ahead with this functionality for 2 records, I doubt if there is a way you can recover both the records once again. This is the most dangerous aspect that I see with the automation concept we discussed in Part II of the Merge Records series of posts.

I also came across a few more issues with the Merge Records functionality. I am penning them down here.

Bookshelf says, when the two records are merged, only the top level, or at most top 2 level records are merged. This is particularly important concept if we consider the case of merging the Account records, for example. We could have contacts and their activities associated with these two Account Records. As per the Bookshelf, only the Account and Contact records should have merged. However, from the face of it, it seems, the Activities records also merge practically.

When we merge two records, Duplicate records are created on the MVG based fields. For eg. merging Person A record with Person B record, would create two records under the Language MVG even if both the original contacts had the same value for Language. The only suggested solution is to remove the duplicate records through scripts (Baad solution proposed, I must say!).

Single value fields are not updated after the Merge Records process. Merge Record process updates the child records by means of Links and Joins based on the Foreign Key fields. Siebel recommends the use of “Data Quality” Siebel OOB functionality. It is available under the head, Administration – Data Quality.

Position records are not merged when mergin Contact records. How could Siebel miss out on such important stuff.

And many more….

The more I explored about it, the more interested I got in the complete MergeRecord functionality. Try running a simple search on Metalink with the Search String, “Merge Records”. I am sure you would become interested, too.

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Siebel – LOV Number Limitation

Nitin Jain — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:32:49 +0000

Siebel List of Values is probably the most commonly used entity in almost all the Siebel EAI projects. I have seen people use LOVs for all sorts of crazy things – storing Language Translations (most common use!), reverse translations, holding Pricing Information, identifying incoming interfaces, setting up a list of allowed values (for eg. in an incoming XML tag), using the Description field to increase the max length that can be stored and what not!

Siebel List of Values have found such profound use and application, possibly because of the famous LookUpValue() function, which can quickly pick out values from the S_LST_OF_VAL table. The LOVs are cached which make this function work even faster and helps Performance. It does have its own set of pains, however.

Once I heard that one of my friends had a requirement, where they created exceptionally large number of LOVs in the List of Values entity, for only one particular LOV Type. They noticed that the LookUpValue() function started failing after some particular values. They noticed that after some 12,000 values, the LookUpValue() function no longer worked!

Digging a little more on Metalink, they found that Siebel officially supports only upto a max of 10,000 values in a particular LOV Type. After that, the LookUpValue() function will fail to return a value.

News to me. But, definitely something that all Siebel Architects could possibly keep in mind when designing Siebel CRM solutions. I guess it is always nice to know the limits upto which one can stretch.

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Siebel Tools hangs when checking out objects

Nitin Jain — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:44:40 +0000

Hi,

Now this is strange. I had been running into some problems when I was checking out objects in my Siebel Tools. What used to happen was that I would set an object for check-out. It would show it fine for some time. all the extracts being done fine, all the tables being checked out one by one et al. All of a sudden, the operation would hang.

I know that the operation definitely hanged because I initially thought that maybe it is just stuck somewhere due to lack of bandwidth. Or maybe it could be that with too many processes running on my system, there just isn’t enough memory! But no. I tried leaving the check out process as it is, and went out for lunch. I came back after about 45 minutes, and it was still hung!. So, I guess the check out process WAS definitely hanging! However, it was happening intermittently, and not always. The check out did proceed to completion successfully some of the times, and only at times would it hang.

I was convinced when I was told by another member in my team informing me of similar issues with her Tools for the past few days. Now, this was enough fodder for me to start searching!

The first thing I did was to log onto the famous ORACLE Metalink, and search out for this problem. This is when I came across the following article:

ORACLE Metalink – Siebel Tools hanging during check out

For the people who donot have immediate access to the Metalink, it says,
“It was found that Object level checkout does not close the database connection. Every time a object is checked out, the connection is not cleanly closed. This results in the maximum number of connections.”

Surprised?
Let me elaborate..

It says whenever we check out and check in an OBJECT (please note the word ‘object’) in Siebel Tools, one of the database connections is left open. So, if I check out once, check in that object, two DB connections were opened – one for check out, and one for check in. However, only one got closed and one always remained open. This would mean, everytime I check out and check in, there would be one more open connection on the DB server. Since every DB server has a maximum number limit of the connections that it can handle, this limit will be reached and the system would stop responding.

This problem is found to be on Siebel version 7.8.2. The Siebel support claims that it is fixed in Siebel v8. In my case, I have Siebel 7.8.2.11, and I feel that this doesn’t help it.

The only solution recommended is to check out entire projects, and not individual objects. I am not sure if it would work out as a solution for any of us, it doesn’t for me! We have a big team working on it, and it may is possible for us to check out entire projects every time as it blocks the usage of that project for other members in the team. Also, it would take much more time in check outs and check ins, which is definitely not within feasible limits. Seems like a Siebel Product Defect that we have to live with.

If anybody has also faced a similar problem, and come up with some workarounds or solutions, please do add to this thread.

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