Common errors and challenges faced with Configuration Deployment Tool

Q: In what scenarios currently do customers use CDT?
A: One of the most common usages is to transfer configuration data from a Development environment to a Production environment and other test environments. Customers also keep a Master Configuration and make configuration level changes only to this. Later they use CDT tool to migrate the changes to Production as well as other test environments.

Q: Who uses CDT?
A: Most of the customers use CDT tool.

Q: What type of data is moved or compared using CDT by the customer?
A: In most of the cases complete configuration data is compared and deployed. In some scenarios customers ignore some of the configuration tables (Ex: YFS_ORGANIZATION, YFS_USER, etc) which they maintain externally. There are scenarios where customers deploy catalog master tables as well using CDT.

Q: What kind of data volume is moved using CDT?
A: In most scenarios, the table level records will be in thousands. Since only configuration level data is used for comparison, number of records is less in most configuration tables. There are instances where customers have records in millions in specific configuration tables (Ex: YFS_LOCATION, YFS_ORGANIZATION, etc)

Q: What kind of issues are not supported?
A:

1. One of the common issues faced by customers is Out-Of-Memory (OOM) during CDT. This is very common in Windows environments. Some customers are able to bypass this problem by using UNIX where they can allocate more memory for JVM. A few customers still have issues even in UNIX due to large data (in millions) on one or more configuration tables.
   Examples:
   1. One of the customers had huge data (in millions) on YFS_LOCATION table and it is growing. They had an issue of OOM and were looking for better way of handling data in the memory to avoid OOM.
   2. Other customers also reported similar issues due to huge data on specific tables.
   3. One customer had huge data in YFS_PRICE_SET table and was receiving OOM errors. Workarounds were provided to ignore those tables (and its dependent tables) in first step and then perform CDT to deploy only those tables in the second step. Even with this option, few customers reported CDT failure due to OOM error. Also the approach might result in data integrity issue/redundant records.
2. A common requirement for customers is to be able to perform import/export operations at the enterprise level using CDT.  This is only supported with the CDT Workbench but is not supported when using the command line interface (CLI)
   • The CDT tool is available as part of IBM OMS. It is available and can be accessed in the CLI (command-line interface) or from the Sterling Order Management Software Development and Deployment Workbench (also known as the "Workbench"). The CLI has limited capabilities and is used to do a full export or import of data. The CDT Workbench has advanced CDT features in comparison to the CLI. For example, driver entity-based comparison and deployment based on enterprise and node.
   • While both are available to OMS on-premise customers, for Order Management on Cloud (OMoC), only the CLI is available, not the Workbench. However, the CDT UI is available on the DTK (developer toolkit) to OMoC customers, a local sandbox environment, not connected to any cloud environment.
   • A suggested workaround for OMoC customers is to use the CDT Workbench on your local DTK and work on enterprise-specific configuration deployment to prepare the final CDT XML files. These can later be deployed on a target OMoC cloud environment.
3. There were requirements from customers where they wanted to deploy few of the "catalog master tables" as well through CDT. Using these tables as custom tables during CDT helps in meeting the above requirement.
4. Customers also use DB to XML/ XML to DB options while performing CDT. Both Windows version (GUI) as well as UNIX versions (cdtshell.sh) are being used by customers.
5. Customers also do Logical group level CDT using Windows GUI. This is not supported on UNIX though.