Has anyone been successful with testing removing unreferenced files with Windchill PDMLink 9.1 M050

[patrick.chin1]

Discovered in WC090M060, the functionality of removing unreferenced files were also incorrectly removing referenced files which caused data corruption. This issue was supposedly solved in WC091M050. Windchill maintenance requires the removal of unreferenced files to ensure the vaults and Windchill/tmp are not filed of erroneous file content from deleted Windchill objects. Has anyone tested and been successful with large implementations with vaults and metadata over 2 TB and 20GIG respectfully.

What do you think about this plan of testing:

1. Ensure that PLMTEST has independent vaults and not read only mounted to PLM
2. Perform a proper mirror of PLMTEST to PLM duplicating the vaults and $WT_HOME/tmp
3. Ensure that PLMTEST vaults and Windchil/tmp are identical in the mirroring process. Check size and number of files.
4. Open an “As Stored” configuration of the largest drawing and assembly in ProE created for each month since November 2008. Record all the assemblies drawings version and iteration with any issues of files missing.
5. In external storage administrator, default cache vault selected, Object menu option, select remove unreferenced files in PLMTEST.
6. Repeat step 4 with the same set of drawings and assemblies. Record any missing files.
7. Compare results between step 6 and 4. If there are any discrepancies where step 6 has more missing files that step 4, open a call with PTC as extremely critical. Do not proceed to implement on PLM.
8. Check the file system sizes and number of files on the vaults and $WT_HOME/tmp.

To reduce the risk, more samples of drawings and assemblies should be in the pool of test. Also, the number of executions and repetition of steps 5 to 7 should increase. This should all be done on PLMTEST with complete success prior to implementing on PLM production

[avillanueva]

I am not sure if Step 4 will uncover all issues but it stands a good
chance of catching something. Still, it's a shot in the dark. Are you
saying that Windchill would have a database record of a file and the
unreferenced file command might remove it? Why not then check against
that database table? You can write a script that would check if each
record matches a corresponding file. This would be the reverse of the
unreferenced file command where you want to see if there are missing
files. I would run it before and after Step 5.

[patrick.chin1]

Antonio,

That sounds like a good idea to compare the actual list of files in the external vaults and its subfolders with the metadata pointers to the content files in the table FVITEM. I would have to create a query to remove items from the list that have markfordeleteA2 flag set to 1. I would also have to see how Windchill identifies ghost objectsand apply appropriate steps. Ghost should really not appear in the FVITEM table. But, I do have reason to believe there some bad logic when the system tries to WVS publish ghost items. This would ensure a better validation of metadata to content. We have millions of content. According to our FVITEM table, the UNIQUESEQUENCENUMBER has around 7,954, 532 items. I think it would be better to put the data of the vaults into another oracle temporary table since the number of items would be so huge to put into a text file for comparison. Or can do the comparison, line by line with a find statement to the external vaults.

It sounds good.

The SPRS and TANS that reference this issue for external vaults are:

• <u>SPR1954314</u> / <u>TAN147796</u>
• <u>SPR1739863</u> / <u>TAN144111</u>
• <u>http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/fo/st/topic=16&post=85380#p85380</u>
  

So be very careful when doing upgrades. I suggest not running this functionality of removal of unreferenced files until you know it works.