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35

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1

I have very little PeopleSoft experience but have been put in a position to support an install. This question could straddles serverfault but is certainly developer oriented.

On a daily basis, we have a PeopleSoft "developer" who writes scripts to fix records/journal entries/approval status etc. To me this screams "bad install" and botched customizations. Is this normal? Is it best practice to have an employee having to write scripts daily just to keep things running?

Note: there is no fraud happening here, he has the full approval of the accounting department when doing this.

A: 

It is unlikely that it is the installation. Likely causes:

  1. Bad customization
  2. Missing patches
  3. Bugs in the delivered code

If you only have one admin, though, and you have only one developer, I would be shocked to hear that there is much in the way of custom code.

Back to the question: It is not normal to need to do SQL updates regularly to fix data. Yes, it happens, but not too often. It is also possible that the end users could fix it from the application, but do not for some reason.

Grant Johnson
Thanks Grant. The custom stuff was all done by a consulting group. There just seems to be an inordinate number of scripts which are run against the database. (we are not a large company).
Darien Ford
Anything done the same way daily is wrong. It should be added to an automatic process. That said, the question you really need to answer is WHY? Since you are new to PS, I figure you still have support. I'd ask Oracle if there are any known issues (addressed by patches) that would cause what you are seeing. They are not often helpful, but sometimes they surprise me.
Grant Johnson
Might also be procedures, either not being followed correctly or not knowing the correct procedures (clients are missing a step). You might also want to look for a process that is not being run and should be.
WayneH