Importing externally maintained configuration data

In your implementation of Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation, you may be required to import certain data into your target that is not part of your source Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation database. For these tables, you should not use CDT to deploy data as it does not have access to the correct data.

Best practices

If you must use the Configuration Deployment Tool to deploy externally maintained data, the recommended way to handle this is to import this data into the source and then use CDT to deploy it into the target. This guarantees data integrity.

If you cannot import this data into your source database, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation supplies features that enable you to work with external data by ensuring that the target database either ignores these tables or appends them. Use the Ignore and Append-only features only if you have tried all other available options and only after subjecting your environment to rigorous testing.

CAUTION:
When using the Ignore or Append-only features, the CDT cannot guarantee the integrity of any external data. In order to ensure data integrity, CDT must have complete access to the configuration data.

Ignore

In cases where data in tables is maintained externally, you can omit these tables from the deployment operation by specifying a preference for them to be ignored.

Ignoring a table or a driver entity also automatically ignores all its dependent tables. However, there are some tables that store data for multiple driver entities and are present in multiple groups. An example of this is the YFS_GRAPH_UI table that contains data for pipelines, services and statuses. Ignoring one of these tables causes CDT to incorrectly mark the corresponding records for deletion.

Append-only mode

In cases where some tables are partially maintained externally, you can specify preferences to ensure that these tables are deployed in an "append-only" mode.

For append-only tables, the dependent tables are not ignored. Marking a table as append-only implies that only a few rows in the target database are maintained on the source system—other rows are externally imported. In such cases, it is extremely important that there is no overlap between the data present in the source and the external system. For example, if you maintain your shipping nodes in the source database and import store information directly into the target, you must not have any stores in the source database. This leads to unpredictable results.