Choosing in-database processing for processes

In-database processing is an option that you can turn on or off for your flowchart processes both globally, and for each flowchart.

In-database processing is not supported for all databases. Your Campaign administrator can confirm whether this option is available for your data sources.

The in-database processing option determines:

what operations are done at the database level or at the local Campaign server level; and

what happens to the results of operations.

In general, the in-database processing option improves flowchart performance by preventing IDs from your database from being unnecessarily copied down to the Campaign server for processing. With in-database processing turned on, processing tasks such as sorting, joining, and merging of data are, whenever possible, done on the database server rather than on the Campaign server, and output cells of processes are stored in temporary tables on the database server.

Depending on the logic required, some functions will still be performed on the Campaign server, even with in-database processing turned on. For example, when Campaign calculates a derived field, it first evaluates the derived field formula to see if any part of the calculation can be performed using SQL. If simple SQL statements can be used to perform the calculation, then the calculation can be done "in-database". If not, then temporary tables are created on the Campaign server to handle the calculations and persist the results from process to process within a flowchart.

In-database processing cannot be done if you have specified any limitations on the output cell size or if temporary tables are disabled for the process.

Processing of custom macros consisting of raw SQL statements is performed in-database, with the following limitations:

All raw SQL custom macros must begin with select and must contain exactly one from in the rest of the text.

For databases that support only insert into <TempTable> syntax, you must have at least one base table mapped to the same data source at the same audience level as the raw SQL custom macro. If the fields selected by the raw SQL custom macro are too large for the fields of the temp table, a runtime error will occur.

If you are using raw SQL with in-database processing, you must code the raw SQL to join with the temp table from the upstream process, otherwise, the results will not be scoped by the results from the upstream process.

Turning in-database processing on or off

To turn in-database processing on or off for a flowchart

To turn in-database processing on or off globally