Purging PRDISTRIB Records?

Stephanie,

Just to play devil's advocate here, is the issue related more to the research or the size of the file? If it is research/reporting, could you create a DB view for say the last year or two years to meet that need without having to purge PR data.

It's not that I am against purging but PR data is one I am leary of just from the perspective of balancing and audits. Which lead me to the question above.

There are a number of lawson supplied purge programs. I beleive the one you would want to look into is PR300 to clear PR data including prdistrib. We have used this in the past to offload data older than seven years which is a typical retention requirement. The offload programs create csv files so you can archive them or load them into another database for inquiry purposes should the need arise.

Hi Stephanie,
I have a different type of suggestion - which has been used with great success in several places (and it's much less trouble while keeping the information easily available).

It's based on the understanding that reports out of PR140 and PR160 and such provide far better information than trying to piece history together from various gigantic tables. This also assumes that the reasons you'd need to look back several years are related to an individual employee, rather than wanting to summarize old data (although summaries are there too, just not across pay periods). If you want more data available, run PR260's across whatever time period you wish.

So, with that, here's how to do it:

- Once per quarter, save all of the payroll reports. A DVD can hold years of them.
- I recommend adding the date as part of the file name, such as PR140.prt.20110228.txt
- On the DVD's you can organize the reports in folders that make them easy to retrieve - by pay cycle, month, or by program.
- Make a couple of copies of the DVD's and make sure one copy is in a vault somewhere.
- Pick your favorite date in PRDISTRIB and run SQL like "delete from prdistrib where date < 12312005" (or whatever date you wish). This can run a long time, so you may want to adjust the SQL to use indexes to run faster or run it over a slow weekend.
- Do the same with PRTIME and any other tables that tend to outgrow their britches.

Does that make sense?

Best regards,
Dave
(303) 773-3535

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! Our issues, at this moment, relate to table size for the most part. Our PR198 unexpectedly went into recovery during our monthly close, and it was because of the size of the PRDISTRIB. Mark, as old-school HR, I, too, am hesitant to purge data, because I've always found that it's needed the day after it's gone. We already do as you suggest, Dave - save copies of all of our reports on both a shared drive for easy user access, and again in Report Safe in the event we lose the info on the shared drive. Joe, even as a consultant, I never had the need to use the purge programs since I obviously wasn't around long enough to worry about getting rid of data. I understand the "concept" of using them, however, I'm not sure of the impact, say, while drilling around on old payment information. We actually have that need, along with reviewing/tracking/tracing the associated expense information relating to said payments. If we purge the data, would the drill around be gone too, I assume? Seems we're hitting table limits every time I turn around lately (not just PRDISTRIB).