Performance Tweaks
These settings enable you to configure how specific data is saved in the People Planner database.
You can choose whether to store 0 (zero) values, empty strings, and false values as null values instead.
When you enable a column for performance tweaking, the default value is changed to being represented by a null. There are three types of columns that this may apply to, as shown in the following table.
| Type of Column | Tweak = Off
(Use the "Empty Value") |
Tweak = On
(Use Null Value) |
|---|---|---|
| Number | 0 | null |
| String | "" | null |
| Boolean/flag | false | null |
For rows that contain values other than the empty value, the data remains the same in the database.
When working with data from a performance-tweaked column in the People Planner user interface (UI), it makes no difference to a user whether the column contains empty values or null values. The null values are for all purposes treated as the default values for the type of column.
The use of performance tweaks significantly reduces network traffic; this improves performance. Null values are more efficient to transfer than 0, "", or flags.
The more rows in the columns with empty fields, the more is gained from using the performance tweak.
The only situation where the actual representation of null values makes a difference is when the columns are used in import mappings. There it matters whether you expect to import nulls or zeros. If you have customized SQL scripts that use some of these columns for calculations, those scripts might not work, or in the worst case, they might return wrong values when null is returned instead of 0.
| Column Name | |
|---|---|
| Events | Value1 - Value10 |
| Flag1 - Flag10 | |
| Auto-calculate Booking Hours | |
| IsFromPrototype | |
| Resources | Value1 - Value10 |
| Flag1 - Flag10 | |
| Assignments | IsFromPrototype |
When you toggle a column's check box, the database is updated, and the column's value is changed from 0 to null or back again, depending on whether you select the checkbox or you deselect it.
To ensure the best possible performance, in the Performance Tweaks tab you should select all of the columns that can safely use null instead of 0/false and click Save.
In People Planner 3.6.1 CU04
The performance tweaks were first introduced in People Planner Release 3.6.1.
As the default in that release, all of the performance tweaks were disabled, both for new databases and for existing databases. This was done to ensure backward compatibility with earlier releases.
To get the benefit from the performance tweaks, you needed to go through the manual process of selecting which fields in People Planner to set the tweak on.
When a system is upgraded to People Planner 3.8, and it is detected that none of the tweaks are selected, it is assumed that no one has done this manual selection of columns to optimize on. When this is the case, the People Planner Web Admin Tool applies the optimization itself.
As part of the upgrade, all columns that are available for performance tweaks are examined. If a column contains the default value only, the performance tweak is activated for that column.
It is still a good idea to manually go through the columns, and if they are not used in import mappings, activate the performance tweak. If any tweaks are selected by the upgrade, but you plan to use the columns in import mappings, you can remove the tweak setting.