This utility extracts information about the PeopleTools tables in a
PeopleSoft database to a set of HTML files that can be navigated via a browser.
Like many other PeopleSoft professionals, I spend a lot of time look at the
PeopleTools tables. In general, these tables contain meta-data about the
PeopleSoft application. Much of the application is stored in PeopleTools tables.
Some provide information about the Data Model. Many of my utility scripts
reference the PeopleTools tables. Thus, it is very helpful to be able to
understand what is in these tables. In PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA I discussed
some tables that are of regular interest. I included the tables that correspond
to the database catalogue, and that are used during the PeopleSoft login
procedure. The tables that are maintained by the process scheduler are valuable
because they contain information about who ran what process when, and how long
they ran.
I am not the only person to have started to document the PeopleTools tables on
their website or blog, most people have picked a few tables that are of
particular interest. However, I want to tackle the problem in a slightly
different way. There are over 4000 PeopleTools tables and view. It is simply not
viable to do even a significant number of them manually. So, I have written some
SQL and PL/SQL to dynamically generate a page for each PeopleTools table and
view, and I have put as much information about these records as I can find in
the PeopleTools tables themselves, augmented with some additional data of my
own. Reference to other objects appear as link to those pages.
The utility is mostly written as a PL/SQL package. It should be installed into
the PeopleSoft owner ID schema (usually SYSADM). It does not require any
additional tables. Oracle's plan table is used as a temporary working storage
table to hold additional metadata.
The source is available on github at https://github.com/davidkurtz/PTRef