Summary data indicators

Another feature that is related to smart inquiries avoids extraneous database requests. This
feature is called summary data indicators. Where the smart inquires feature side-steps
unnecessary queries for all WCC services, the summary data indicators feature avoids
queries on a per-transaction basis. When the summary data indicators feature is enabled,
WCC business objects with child entities are tracked in the CONTSUMMARY database table.
For every applicable business object in a query, this table is consulted to determine if it is
necessary for WCC to make an additional query for child objects.
For example, a WCC query for a person without an identifier can skip the database query and
application overhead if no identifier is present for that particular party. If the same query is
executed for a person with an identifier present, then WCC proceeds to retrieve it as normal.
When using summary data indicators, keep in mind the following considerations:
The CONTSUMMARY table must be maintained for all add and update transactions that
add or remove child objects, adding slightly more overhead to these transactions.
The CONTSUMMARY table has a large record count and must be considered in your “hot”
database table list because many queries make requests to it. Because the index is
unique (based on the contact id column, cont_id) and most of the column values are of the
type SMALLINT, these are relatively low-overhead SELECT statements.
This optimization applies best for WCC databases that have a significant number of
parties without particular child objects. If all or most of your parties possess a particular
child object, then it does not make sense to employ this feature. If you did not intend to use
a particular child object in your implementation, then use smart inquiries to turn off that
portion of the model.