Tricks of the Trade: First Class Denizens of the Universe (Part 1 of 3)

Contributed by: John Sharpe, President, Comstock Software, Inc.

As a MEDITECH Client Server Analyst who is aspiring to greater responsibilities, no doubt you’ll find yourself writing NPR reports. This article is the first in a series of three where we examine strategies to keep you in the lime light for all the right reasons.

In Part 1, we grow eyes in the back of our heads by writing an NPR report to keep an eye out for runaway NPR jobs. There’s nothing good about a midnight call for an NPR report that’s been consuming server resources and has your name on it. To head that situation off at the pass, let’s write a report we can run at the end of the day to double back on our jobs.

The NPR.JOB.TABLE.main detail segment contains the information we’ll need for this report. To keep the format simple, this report will be structured as a DOWNLOAD. For more detail on MEDITECH Downloads, see the links at the bottom of this article.

On page 2 of the report writer; we’ll set a SELECT on user. This will allow us to return only the jobs for the relevant user: you.

On page 3, we set the following fields: db, user, client, start.date, start.hhmm, comment, appl.svr, ring, job.urn & process.number. For additional fields, we’d want to refer to the MEDITECH Data Definitions @ http://meditech.com/prrw/pages/RWbbASdatadef.htm.

To run the report, enter the appropriate user mnemonic and DOWNLOAD path.

Realistically, at the end of the day, you’d just run this to the ‘Browser’. But I’ve taken the liberty to import the data into Microsoft Excel for display purposes.

From the report, you can see that I might not be aware of the jobs started at 0900 & 1517. If these jobs were reports that shouldn’t be running thru the night, the end of the day is a great time to catch them and prevent a potential middle of the night rendezvous with the on-call person or MEDITECH.

MEDITECH Download Tips:
- http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/2006/01/meditech-npr-download-tips.html
- http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/2007/10/multiples-in-downloads-npr-report.html

John Sharpe is President / NPR Consultant at Comstock Software, Inc. John hosts the ‘Meditech NPR Report Writing’ blog at http://comstock-software.com/blogs/npr/ where you can learn and read more about NPR Report Writing