The Importance of Logging Off Nightly

For some of you, the importance of logging off your systems on a nightly basis is a no-brainer.  However, many of you may not have been informed as to why this sort of think needs to be addressed.

Staying logged into application software may leave certain data fields, data files, or applications in a "locked" (in use) state.

This kind of locking generally falls into one or more of the following areas.

1. Field level locking - Where specific datafield(s) are locked by a specific program.

2. File level Locking - Where specific data file(s) are locked by a user or application program.

3. Application Locking - Where part of a application program, or the entire program is locked. 

This means that overnight procedures such polling, posting, Offline Ticket Entry updates, and data file/database backups may not be executing or completing properly.  This type of situation can add to system and application instability, data synchronization issues, and cause data corruption.

If locked files are not being backed-up for long periods of time, this could prevent you from recovering from a catastrophic system failure without substantial data loss.

As a recent example...

A CounterPoint Multi-Site customer was having intermittent, unexplained overnight processing failures where selected parts of the scripted overnight processing procedures were being skipped.

However, there were no specific error message indicating as to why this inconsistent behavior was occurring.

This was later determined to be due to the following:

A user had been continuously logged into CounterPoint for several weeks.  Periodically the user would go into a software feature that locked files that overnight processing function requires exclusive rights to.  They would then just leave the office without exiting the software.   Subsequently, because of all of the open and locked
files involved, the Multi-Site Import Satellite Import function, the End of Day Post function, and the "Search For Changes" functions were all being skipped. This resulted in no sales activity from the remote stores being imported/posted,and no update files being sent back to the stores.

If you are having any intermittent or unusually behavior with your systems, please contact the CCS Retail Systems Support Department for assistance.