Advanced Metadata Queries for Valuable Hidden System Information

Metadata means “Data about Data.” Understanding how to use PeopleSoft metadata effectively saves you time in solving system issues and is an essential skill for database analysts, system developers, and functional users.

PeopleSoft uses metadata to control how data is created in the system and how system upgrades are handled, to provide information for system audits, and to retain data integrity. Because of the way the metadata is stored and encoded, it can’t be used directly-it must be decoded and joined directly first.

In this session, we will show you examples of how we decoded and joined PeopleSoft metadata and used the results to create new functions, views and queries. We’ll also show you how we link these new custom views, functions, and queries to the raw PeopleSoft metadata. During this session, we’ll cover the challenges we faced in building these queries and how we resolved them.

With our new queries, system users can complete query prompts to search for hidden system information related to data such as record, field, key, and configuration. We rely on these queries every day to find valuable but hidden system information.

Speaker(s): Alan Hwang, ePro Tech Lead, UNC at Chapel Hill