Categories
Configuration Elasticsearch ELK Hints and Tips Peoplesoft VirtualBox

DPK VirtualBox Memory Allocation

Even though my laptop has a decent 12 Gb of RAM, I still like to minimise the RAM allocated to PeopleSoft VMs.

My experience is that the sweet spot is 3072 Mb for VMs without SES – I never bother with the beast that is SES. After all it is a dead application – Elasticsearch cannot arrive soon enough for me. You can get away with 2560 Mb of RAM but you will see some swapping in OEL – not good even if you have a fast SSD. Mine is “ok” – a Samsung 1 TB 850 EVO but allowing any swapping still makes the system slow down considerably.

Categories
Configuration Peoplesoft Performance SQL Server

Trace Flag 4136 and PeopleSoft

Trace flag 4136 effectively adds an OPTION(OPTIMIZE FOR UNKNOWN) to all SQL statements. This has the effect of making the optimizer ignore histogram statistics in generating execution plans.

If you have extremely skewed data distributions this can actually result in a much better execution plan – it essentially gives the impression of more “consistent” performance by ensuring that you don’t end up with an execution plan suited to only one subset of your data. But it will not necessarily be the best execution plan you could manage,

Categories
BI Publisher Configuration Peoplesoft Tools

BI Publisher fix for XLSX Cell Merging Problem in PeopleSoft

Under PeopleTools 8.53 the default Excel output format for BI Publisher reports is now native XLSX rather than “MHTML” as in previous releases. This has a number of advantages such as a much smaller output file size due to it being a real Excel format and not HTML :-).

The change to this format by default also has some interesting issues with cells and cell merging that are fixed in a BI Publisher patch. The description of the bug is: