Recommit Schedule in PowerScheduler?

[Mara Lutomski]

I am new to schedules. 

We committed our schedule, rolled over the year but now I want to make changes and I would prefer to use the visual scheduler. 

My question is, can I get back into PowerScheduler, move things around in the visual scheduler, recommit and it will show up on the live side? Will it mess anything up? We haven't made any changes on the live side at this point. Help

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Mara E. Lutomski

Admin. Asst. to Supt./School Board
Petersburg School District
PO Box 289
Petersburg, AK  99833

1-877-526-7656 / Ext: 100

[Collin Lasley]

According to this article, the ability to recommit the schedule without needing to manually delete the records from the CC and SECTIONS tables was added in PowerSchool 12. I do have two pieces of advice just in case:

1. Based on what I’ve read (I’m being intentionally vague here because the posts were of varying ages), some functions of PowerSchool that rely on the schedule will be “wonky” after trying to do this. Ex: the schedule matrix might look a bit like swiss cheese. To fix this, you can force PowerSchool to rebuild the SECTION_MEETING table as follows:
   1. If you’re using the old interface (aka the “good” interface), log on to PS Administrator and use the sidebar to go to Setup>System>Special Operations. If you’re using the new interface... I have no idea. It should be easy to find, but if not-Pearson hid it really well, I think I have a demo server kicking around with the Enhanced UI that I could poke around in.
   2. Select the “Reset Section Meetings” operation
   3. In the Param 1 Field, enter the first year of the school year you’re resetting. Unless you’re doing something weird, I imagine this would be 2023.
   4. In the Password AKA “Code” field, enter the password “resetsm”
   5. Press submit. PowerSchool will rebuild the table for the school that you were set to when you submit the operation. It will do the whole district if you were in the District Office. If you have access to PowerSchool Monitor, you can watch the progress on the log messages that flash by.
2. The whole process of re-committing and re-building the meetings table should be a lot safer now than it used to be, but you would be well advised to be mentally prepared to restore your database if something happens:
   1. If you are PowerSchool hosted, note the time (year/month/day hour/minute) that you do this operation, since (apparently) only PowerSchool can do the restoring process. Boo.
   2. If You’re one of the cool kids who hosts their own PowerSchool instance, you can make this super easy on yourself since you know that you’re potentially causing an issue before you do it; no Point-In-Time-Recovery Needed!
      1. Log on to the database server’s command prompt and connect RMAN to your database.
      2. Run CREATE RESTORE POINT SCHEDULE_RESTORE GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE;
      3. Run all of your dodgy scheduler operations. While you’re doing this, Oracle is essentially recording “undo” logs as well as its normal “redo” logs.
      4. If nothing went wrong, hop back into RMAN and run DROP RESTORE POINT SCHEDULE_RESTORE;
      5. If anything at all went wrong, simply go back rewind to the restore point:
         1. SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE;
         2. STARTUP NOMOUNT;
         3. ALTER DATABASE MOUNT;
         4. FLASHBACK DATABASE TO RESTORE POINT SCHEDULE_RESTORE;
         5. ALTER DATABASE OPEN RESETLOGS;
      6. Either way, make sure you run the DROP RESTORE POINT command, since the undo logs will keep growing forever unless you run it. You won’t need to do anything special for app nodes. And... under the table and absolutely not PowerSchool approved, I’ve actually done this without stopping PowerSchool and everything came back up just fine, aside from the downtime while the database was closed, which was less than five minutes.

Collin Lasley

Systems Programmer & Database Administrator

FNSBSD Information Services

Phone: District Office (907-452-2000) Extension 11370