The generated data set

Infor Process Automation reporting is based on a data set which is effectively a snapshot in time. Some things to know about the data:

• You are required to specify a time range (begin and end dates) when you generate data. This requirement is to ensure that execution data, which can quickly become large, does not become so large that it overwhelms your system.

• Generated data sets are cumulative. Depending on how the data is specified, a newly generated data set might overwrite an existing one or it might append to it. The following examples help to explain how this works:

  Data generated on (date)	Date range specified	Result
  January 1, 2013	December 1-31, 2012	One month's worth of data. On many systems this would be a good amount of data to use in reporting.
  January 1, 2013	January 1, 2012- December 31, 2012	One year's worth of data. On many systems, this would be a huge amount of data, possibly too large to be useful. You might not want to store this much data on your production system. You could instead create monthly or quarterly data sets. A good practice would be to archive and then delete the previous month or quarter's data before re-generating.
  January 16, 2013	January 1-15, 2013	Half month of data.
  February 1, 2013	January 1-31, 2013	Full month of data. The data set from the first half of January (previous example) is overwritten (but in this case it is still available because it is combined with the data from the second half of the month).
  March 1, 2013	January 1- February 28, 2013	Two months of data; previous data for January is overwritten and combined with the February data.