8.1 - Symphony Reports & Scheduling
Introduction:
Symphony/Workflows reports are grouped into three
different categories -
- Maintenance/Administrative reports
- Notice reports
- Statistical reports
Care must be taken when scheduling reports to ensure
they do not conflict with any other reports or processing running on the server
at the same time. This section provides guidelines on the scheduling of
reports.
8.1.1 – Report Groups & Categories
There are over 400 delivered Symphony reports and below are the lists of reports which are available to the Consortium for the modules that have been purchased.
Symphony
reports are divided into groups and categories. The groups are to aid Libraries
to locate the report required to meet their needs. The groups are generally by
module or activity. For example - Acquisitions, Bibliographic, Circulation, or
Users Report Groups.
The
report categories are Maintenance, Notice and Statistical reports.
- Maintenance Reports - Any report that modifies/updates records in the various Symphony databases. These include indexing, editing of users, title or items, or deleting/removing records.
- Notice Reports - Any report which generates a
notice for patrons. These include overdue and lost notices, hold notices, and
user announcements. These reports may also update records or data by
incrementing the “notice count” on a given charge, hold or user record.
- Statistical Reports - Reports which provide
details about transactions, users, items or titles in the database. These may
include count and list reports, as well as actual statistical reports.
Guidelines for running reports
There are some reports which must only be run when the Symphony services are halted and no-one is using the system. For example:
Rebuild Heading Database
Rebuild Heading Display Databases
Rebuild Authority Index
Rebuild Authority Thesaurus.
Libraries
should also consider the following general principles when scheduling reports:
a) Reports which remove records from the system should be run following a
full backup and should be run outside library hours.
b) Database maintenance reports should be run overnight.
c) Notice reports, updating the database counts, are best scheduled to run
overnight.
d) Where possible, to ensure optimum system performance, it is recommended that statistical and list reports where large groups of records are involved in the selection and output should be run out of hours.
e) Care should be taken with selections for the Print History and Scan History Log reports. The criteria for these reports should be defined as narrowly as possible.
What is the impact of a report?
If you are unsure as to impact of running a specific report on the system, please speak with the Systems Administrator before scheduling.
8.1.2 - Process for Scheduling New
Ongoing Reports
This
process is required when Libraries need to add a new report to the list of
scheduled reports already in being run on the Symphony system. Due to the size of the system and the number
of reports that run on a regular basis scheduling reports is a critical issue.
When
thinking about scheduling a report on a regular basis some principles need to
be adhered to before setting up the report.
1. Decide if you need the report to run in Symphony or whether the
information can be obtained from BLUEcloud Analytics.
2. Outline what the report is for and what information you want to obtain
from the report.
3. Talk to the System Administrator about your library requirements.
4. Run the report in the Test database to see if it gives you the results
you want to achieve.
5. The System Administrator will work out the time that is appropriate to
schedule the report.
6. The System Administrator will talk to Client Care if there are issues
with the report or problems with scheduling etc.
Removing Finished Reports
a) Libraries should remove Finished Reports that belong to them once they are no longer required. Never remove a report that does not belong to your Library.
b) A Purge Finished Reports report will be scheduled daily to remove any Finished Report older than 28 days.
c) Should a library wish to keep a report for longer than 28 days, they
should save the report file to a local network or hard drive.