30-Minute Session Time Out to be Implemented in Ad Hoc Reporting

On June 21st, a 30-minute session timeout will be applied to the DWCENPRD and DWUTSPRD ad hoc reporting environment to conform to Harvard's Security and Privacy Policy 2.6. CREW, Oracle Financials and other of Harvard’s enterprise systems have session time-outs built in already. Implementing in the ad hoc reporting environments is an important step in further enhancing the security of Harvard’s information.

Impact on Users: After 30 minutes of idle time, a user’s database connection will be severed. The time while a query is actively processing is not considered idle time as the database is being actively engaged as the query runs.

Impact to Long Running Queries in TOAD: Results from queries using TOAD must be viewed and/or saved within 30 minutes of completion. The results of queries that complete but are left unattended beyond 30 minutes of their completion time will not be retrievable at that point. Brio queries are not affected in this way and results will remain on the desktop until the application is closed.

TOAD Long Running Query Workaround

To avoid losing query results (if you are IMSUTS/HDWUTS user) when unable to monitor the progress of the query follow these simple steps:

1. Log into your account in a UTS database – HDWUTS or IMSUTS.

2. Prefix the query with

CREATE TABLE AS
SELECT field1, field2, ...
From table1, table2
Where ...

When the query completes the results will be stored in the new table specified in the first line above. If your session times out 30 minutes after the query completes (or if it is shut down during the nightly HDW load process) the query results will still be available in the table that was created.

Where columns are constructed from expressions you will need to give them aliases that can be used by Oracle to set the column name. For example, the modified query with aliases for expressions is as follows:

CREATE TABLE MYTABLE
AS
SELECT field1, field2, sum(salary) total_salary, count(*) salary_count From table1, table2 Where ...
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