AutoCollect - Creating User Defined DELTA Rowsets › Manipulating Delta Rowsets - User Created Delta Rowsets › Tagging Rows

Tagging Rows

As discussed above, you have the flexibility of overriding the MUFNAME value using the OUTNAME parameter. This functionality allows you to either combine or separate snapshots by MUFNAME before processing them into delta rowsets.

The AutoCollect OUTTAG parameter is valid for OPTION=BASELINE, OPTION=SUMMARY and OPTION=AVGPERF. The OUTTAG parameter provides a simple way to identify or tag Delta rowsets created with the SUMMARY, BASELINE, and AVGPERF functions. Once the rowsets are tagged with this addition identifier, future AutoCollect functions can use this value as part of their selection criteria. The OUTTAG parameter is useful in situations where you have a lot of data in the DELTA database that you want to keep, but would like to mark certain rowsets.

Since the tag information could be used to both select the input to a BASELINE, AVGPERF or SUMMARY function and to tag the output of the function, we have implemented a second parameter that is used when selecting rows by the tag information. This parameter is named USERTAG.

USERTAG is used to select delta rowsets that are being processed by the BASELINE, AVGPERF, SUMMARY, DELTARPT, and DELTADEL functions.

Example:

Summary rows are created from daytime intervals and nighttime intervals. You want to keep these summaries separate so that different spreadsheets can be generated. You could use the TIMETO and TIMEFROM values during the data extract (DSVOUT) function to do this. But in some cases the times may be varying and coding the time selection parameters may not be possible. In these cases, you can use the OUTTAG parameter during the OPTION=SUMMARY rowset creation to mark the rowsets for NIGHT versus DAY.

Since the USERTAG column, like all Delta columns, can be updated by user programs, you can add your own routines to mark selected rowsets to create special reports, generate spreadsheets, and so on. While user programs can be written using the standard RAAT, SAAT and SQL APIs, we recommend that they are not used to manipulate the delta rows’ data column content as this may create problems for the rest of the AutoCollect functions or lead to improper performance reporting.

This OUTTAG/USERTAG functionality is only needed when you move into more complex processing situations.