Summary:
We are performing an upgrade from Financials V7.52/Tools V7.62 to Financials V8.4/ Tools V8.42. The data conversion seems to be very time consuming. Does anyone have any thoughts to share on how to drastically increase performance?

Answer1
You may want to check first with your DBA to make sure that there are no other bottlenecks that are causing this slowdown. It may be I/O, something wrong with the database, etc. I know for sure that the 7.5 to 8.4 conversion is slow, and the only way to speed things up (assuming your database is OK) is to build indexes. It is not necessarily true that building indexes will slow down the inserts. Any tuning we have done after going live on 8.4 has involved the creation of indexes. You may have to place hints in any App Engine conversion programs, but you do not have to create indexes constantly.

First, test your conversion and make note of the slow SQL/App Engine. You will have to use a variety of traces to find out where the slowdown is. Then, analyze the SQL in the scripts to see if hints are needed, and on what type of indexes they are needed. Chances are your indexes will only have to be created once (in the source database since you are pulling data from there). Then, reuse the tested scripts to do your conversion. Also, be sure that your upgrade assistant and SQL is running from a PC that has a fast connection to the database server. You may also want to run the conversion scripts on the database server.

Answer2

Take a look at the results of the step prior to data conversion where the unique indexes were created. Some of those create index statements will have failed because there were duplicate rows. Quite often they have failed because PeopleSoft is changing the key structure of the table and the post data conversion Alter with Deletes step takes care of the problem.

What this means for performance is that you may have a table used in a data conversion program that doesn’t have an index. If you create a non-unique index you will see an improvement in performance. PeopleSoft has addressed some of these problems; but in the last upgrade I did I had to create a few additional non-unique indexes.

The data that is used in the conversion tasks is always on the target, not the the source database. If you are creating indexes for use in the data conversion steps and they are defined in Application Designer on the source (first copy of prod), they should get created with all the other indexes prior to running the data conversion tasks. Since you will probably not need these indexes after the upgrade you will have to delete then from App Designer when you finish. If you create them outside of App Designer in a script, you’ll need to run the script for each test move and the final move to production.

*Questions excerpted from ITToolBox.com*

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