We are bringing another business into the Windchill fold. This business has over a million parts to be loaded, and I am interested if anyone has any experience with loading this many parts what worked well and what did not work. Example, I would suspect that placing all parts into one folder is probably not a good thing, but what are the guidlines for number of objects in a folder? I would expect that searching would be negatively impacted and that we should look into indexing, but has anyone any experience to support his?
I am also interested in hearing about any other thoughs and experiences.
Thanks in advance for you assistance.
1 Million?? Parts or CAD Docs?
Is that full history ... all versions/revisions? or is it 1 million LATEST??
Is it coming from INTRALINK 3.X? or file system?? or another PDM???
As Bob mentioned, you could write a book about such a project.
Thanks!
Rick Passolt
Fishbowl Solutions
rpassolt@fishbowlsolutions.com
Hey Jeffry,
To me,the folder question is only relevant if you have to consider differences in access rights and behavior of your articles. If in the originating system there is no way to differentiate those articles, just dump them in one WT-folder, I would say.
Apart from this, I would consider assessing the sizing of your IT-infrastructure first. Airbus is managed on Windchill (I've been told, at least), so Windchill is capable of handling verybig data sets. But if your servers and network are not setup properly, your upcoming merge will not be a big success.
Another remark in this perspective. Is anyone ever confronted with a split of the database? Suppose a part of your company is acquired by someone else, and hence, your data has to get out of Windchill, to be imported in an alien environment. Is there a scenario to accomplished this (just an academic question)?
Regards, Hugo.
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In Reply to Jeffry Ruff:
We are bringing another business into the Windchill fold. This business has over a million parts to be loaded, and I am interested if anyone has any experience with loading this many parts what worked well and what did not work. Example, I would suspect that placing all parts into one folder is probably not a good thing, but what are the guidlines for number of objects in a folder? I would expect that searching would be negatively impacted and that we should look into indexing, but has anyone any experience to support his?
I am also interested in hearing about any other thoughs and experiences.
Thanks in advance for you assistance.
Are you talking about WTParts or CAD?
Really to give you good advice we would need a little more information. Why do you want to load the data? What are you planning to achieve and what is the benefit to your business from doing that? Presumably the intent is to migrate the group and their data, so you transition control and management of all the information to a single Windchill system?
Really that is where your challenge is. The system mechanics of loading data to Windchill is easy enough, fiddly and painful but logical and straightforward once you know what you are doing. It is also simple enough to get Windchill to handle a large dataset and user count as long as your hardware is up to the job. Your real challenge is actually on the human side of the migration, particularly around control of the data, specifically access control and business processes.
Are you planning to transition the incoming users to your existing data and business model? Or Implement their current setup in your existing system? Does your new group need to interact and collaborate with your existing users? Do you need to transition everyone to the same Library parts? It is questions like that you need to ask and get answers to before you worry about the system mechanics.
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Lewis