Actian DataConnect Breathes new life into Oracle CRM OnDemand Connector
by David Byrd
Recently one of our
customers ran into a problem with a particular connection to a custom object in
Oracle CRM OnDemand. This process had been in place since it was
originally developed under the Pervasive Data Integrator name. And
after much analysis we determined it was a bug in the existing version the
client had installed. We installed a more current version that Actian
provided, but that did not work.
I made a few product
suggestions to my Actian support rep, and that was run up the chain of command
to the Product manager who agreed these suggestions were worthy.
SO their engineering team got on with the changes and we recently started
testing with them.
So maybe first it
would be good to identify the issues I was running into when querying against a
large custom object.
1. The query
would timeout when you hit Establish Connection.
2. The workaround for
the query timeout was to set up a user that would only return records they
owned ( this was normally a small set of records ). This worked great
unless you forget to set the macro back which would impact
production.
3. The current
map in the process which I rebuilt several times before Actian provided this
latest version, would query for all records ( around 19000+) but only return
3000+.
So I waited patiently
for Actian to provide an upgraded version.
They made their
changes and provided a build for me. They had now provided a
timeout feature on the session screen.
On the first try I
built an new dataset, and it queried all 19000+ of the records. Note that
this took a long time... 20 plus minutes, but it did not timeout.
I thought-- awesome
this works. So I save and back out to the map.
However when I ran the
map with the new dataset and retrieved the 3000+ records.
So the error/bug was
in the map!
So I went thru
building the map, and using the dataset wizards to build it. Upon
building the new source, the Dataset builder it ran very quickly retrieving
only 25 records and building out the schema. The 25 records was surprising,
and everything looked good, so using the map dataset wizard now build out the
schema using just a sample of 25 records.
I did set the timeout
for 0 if that makes a difference.
I am going to reset to
larger of 200 and see how that goes.
And that returned 25
too. Interesting.
So, the bottom line is
if you click build new map and walk-through the wizards that walk you thru
building a data-set, when you hit establish connection,
it works really quickly and returns 25
rows.... no matter what value you put in the timeout field.
I like this!
Once I had all the
mappings completed in this new map, I ran it , and it retrieved all 19000+
records. Yes - works.
Just some notes,
if you are in a newly created map and do change schema, and then create new
dataset, when you hit establish connection,
it works really slow and returns all the rows.... around
19000. But the map still works. The new changes definitely
have some nuisances, but ultimately provide a much more enriched customer
experience.
