I just found an AG with no Segment Field...

[Justin Derrick]

So at a customer site, I found an Application Group that was defined without a Segment Field.  Despite the warning about not defining an App Group without a Segment field, this definition made it all the way to production...  three years ago!

The Storage is set to 'Cache Only' and the expiration type is "Load", and the Load ID is coming back with zeros in the mix/max date fields...  But somehow, data is still expiring on an appropriate schedule.

I'm baffled as to how this is actually working.  Has anyone dealt with this before?

-JD.

[rjrussel]

So what fields are in the application group? My guess is its being based on load date.

[Justin Derrick]

That's the thing...  There is a "DocumentDate" field, but it's not selected as segment.  There's no other date field defined. 

I've been thinking about it on and off for hours, and the only thing I can think of is, at load time, it's placed in the cache with an expiry date of today+90 days...  Then the cache expiration runs weekly, and the eligible files expire.  Either that, or maybe it's using a field from the arsload table.  I'll have to dig into it some more when I'm back on site.

-JD.

[rjrussel]

If you don't specify a segment field, expiration is simply based off the date the data was loaded. There is nothing else to it.

When you get back and look at the arsload table you will see a value set for EXP_DATE. That date is the date the data was loaded.

Thanks,
Rob

[Justin Derrick]

Cool.  Thanks for the insight Rob. 

I had a quick meeting with the customer on Friday, and I think we're just going to copy, correct, and reload the data by having the line of business resend everything.

-JD.

[Lars Bencze]

I've had several cases of upgrading customers to 9.5 (was it?) and beyond. When the date format is changed from small_int to TIMESTAMP, the ARSSEG table gets zeroes or minus 1 as min/max values. This causes searches against affected Application Groups to return zero results (spooking the canola out of the customer  ), even though the data is safely stored in their systems.
There is a PMR about this, PMR 39507,140,846, where the activities to solve this is documented. But I guess many/some of you have already done this.