Being an
engineer i always had difficulty handling concept of ‘Date’. However through
this article I would try to explain my understanding of DateTrack feature in
Oracle Apps.
DateTrack
adds the dimension of time to an application's database. It is a means of
maintaining a history of changes to personnel records. The value of a
DateTracked record depends on the date from which you are viewing the data. It
applies to the People and Assignment details of a person’s record in Oracle HR.
Each of the areas that are date tracked within a record are date tracked
independently.
We can
‘date track’ by setting an Effective Date. An effective date is the date at a
particular point in time when a person’s record is effective. When you set an
effective date for your work, DateTrack ensures that only information effective
on that day is used for any processing, validation, inquiry and reporting you
carry out. Let’s understand this in this simple diagram, which is considered
as timeline of a personal record.
It shows how the person’s Status has changed
over time to reflect their changing circumstances. As the changes are made in
Oracle, the system keeps a record of each change. These records can be thought
of as different slices – or different pages in a file that show each change.
Date tracking allows you to visit each slice or page at any time. If you set
the effective date to 17 July 2001, the record would show that this individual
is married. Reset back to today and the marital status would show as divorced.
Take
another example for employee Assignment. In this example the assignment record
shows how this person’s Position changes over time. When this person originally
started in company, their position was Programmer 1. Over time his position
gets changed and Oracle keeps maintaining the history of this. In addition,
this individual has been told that they have a new position which will take
effect as of the 01-Jan-2008. Using date tracking you can record that this
position change will take effect in advance of it happening – simply by setting
the Effective Date to 01 Jan 2008 and making the change. Until that date
actually arrives, the position will still show as the current one.
To control
these date tracking rows, every DateTracked table must include these columns:
- EFFECTIVE_START_DATE DATE NOT NULL
- EFFECTIVE_END_DATE DATE NOT NULL
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