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Steve Friedl's Evolution Tech Tips

Rebuilding Evolution TMP_TBLS

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Most of the housekeeping tasks in the iSystems Evolution™ payroll service-bureau system are done by administrators using the EEC (Evolution Enterprise Controller), but one common task — rebuilding the temporary tables — can be done from the Evolution application client itself. This Evo Tip provides instructions for how to perform this.

Rebuilding TMP_TBLS requires admin rights, so it may be required to login as the explicit admin user - this will become apparent if the required menu items are not found on user's menu as shown.

• Click SB Admin, then Maintenance

  

• Set the number of threads, which is normally based on the number of processors on the target DB servers. If you're rebuilding just a few files, then this setting doesn't matter, but if you have absolutely no idea what to choose, pick 4.

  Then click Rebuild Temporary Tables, and confirm when asked.

  

  Note that this does not actually launch the rebuild process yet, there's still one more entry required.

• Internal Client Numbers Though a service bureau can pick more or less any scheme for identifying clients ("PR123", "003-947", "SJF123", etc.), internally Evolution keeps track of them by internal client number — these are what the temp-table rebuild process requires.

  Click Client and browse the list, then scroll the client display to the right to reveal the Internal CL#.

  Choose what to rebuild, and this must be an internal client number - not the number you use to identify the client in everyday parlance (See sidebar).

  Everything
  Just one client
  Multiple individual clients
  Range of clients

• Click OK to start the process.

Rebuilding of temp tables is done one client at a time per thread, and for small numbers of clients (one or two) it will complete very quickly. This process may be run during live production, though for doing full rebuilds it's recommended to wait until the off hours due to the amount of time it takes and the load it puts on the system.

Progress is shown in the Current status display, and the last numbers (m/n) shows how many (m) of the total (n) have been completed.

Note - there is no elegant way to interrupt a temp-table rebuild.

Update: In the past, it was recommended to backup+restore the TMP_TBLS database after rebuilding, but this is no longer necessary as of the Plymouth release. Don't bother.

This is not necessary or recommended when rebuilding just a few clients.

2007/06/26: First published
2018/04/09: updated