p_cir_32: too many records older than 999 days. Can we use SQL?

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 18.01

Description:
We are looking to start running the cir-32 jobs (remove patron id's). Right now we have a large batch of unscrubbed records going back to July of 2002. Since the date parameter for cir-32 only allows for 999 days of id's to be kept, running the initial job means that over 2 years worth of circulation transactions are scrubbed.

Running cir-32 on our test server takes about 20 hours to scrub z36h and 10 hours to scrub z35 using the maximum criteria. Having the other circulation jobs stay in queue for 20 hours would cause considerable disruptions with our services. And even then, we would still have 999 days of data to scrub.

Is it possible that we could bypass cir-32 and "scrub" the z35_id and the z36h_id using sql update or are there consequences in scrubbing this way? And if it is ok to scrub using sql update, are there additional fields that need to be replaced as well?

Resolution:
There is no reason that this cannot be done with SQL. I suggest, however, that you follow the p_cir_32 convention of making the first three characters of the z35_id, z36h_id, z37h_id "SCR". If you don't, p_cir_32 will not recognize your records as having had the link removed and will want to reprocess them all. This problem is described in KB 8192-2615.

Before p_cir_32 was created, sites were doing this with SQL.