Recovering a workflow

I've discovered a powerful option within Informatica's Workflow Manager. This might be old hat to some of you, but it was new to me, so I thought I'd share it.

In general, restarting a down workflow is kind of a pain, especially if you have one as complex as the main one I maintain:


In this workflow, I've identified a couple of "merge points". These are sessions that run all by themselves. The beauty of these specific sessions is that if the workflow fails at some point before these merge points, I can "Restart workflow from task" and once it gets up to the "merge point", I can then "restart workflow from task" at the merge point, and then let it run from there.

There's a better way - suspense.

In the Workflow General properties (Workflow -> edit -> general tab) you'll see a checkbox called "Suspend on Error". Honestly, why this isn't checked by default is kind of a mystery, because it's a beautiful, powerful thing.

When a session fails, the workflow will go into "Suspend" mode. When in suspense mode, you have the option to "recover" the workflow. Once chosen, the workflow will restart whatever down job there is, and then finish the workflow from there. The beauty of this option is that you don't have to intervene at the merge point. So, if a job that would normally run in parallel to other sessions fails, you don't have to then restart the workflow from the merge point forward. Informatica retains session status and can continue on the workflow as needed.




When recovered, the failed job gets this weird red/green hybrid line to indicate that it was failed, but then succeeded.

I wonder if they use Informatica?

Saw this article on CNN today:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/15/quadrillion.dollar.glitch/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Haha! It seems likely to me that someone probably had the wrong arrow pointed to a float field. Was probably some sort of insanely large transaction key field - just a huge integer. Notice there was no decimal value. So, they probably ended up sticking some gigantic numeric field into a credit float field.

Not that first time I've seen this kind of thing. Seems like it happens every couple of months, actually.

Edit checks are a good thing. I'm thinking if you code a system that handles credit card data, and a single credit comes across that's larger than the national debt, you might want to throw an error and abend.

You know - just a suggestion.