If you are running the standard purge utility in iMIS you may be orphaning some of your user defined demographic records. The standard iMIS purge utility is designed to purge records from all of the standard iMIS tables, such as name, name_address, name_fin, name_notes, etc. Because there is no way for the developers of iMIS to know what user defined demographic tables you will create, that is left for you (or your iMIS solution provider) to add to the purge utility. So in most cases, you should never run the standard iMIS purge utility without having added those tables. If you do, that will purge all of the standard iMIS tables orphaning records in any of your user defined tables.

If you do not have an updated purge utility don’t worry, it is easy to create. Before we get into adding your user defined demographic tables to the purge utility, we need to find them all. You can do that by:

• Customers>Set up module>General
• Click on the Additional Windows button
• In the Defined Tables area you will see all of the tables listed – so make note of them

Now that you are armed with a list of your user defined demographic tables, we can now jump into adding them to the purge utility. You can do that by:

• Utilities>Report Specs
• Select SYSTEM-Purge-Membership Purge for MS SQL (ASA if still using Sybase)
• Click on the Clone button – this will allow you to create a new purge utility just for your confirmation
• Enter in a new title for the purge – example: ACRONYM Membership Purge for MS SQL
• Click the Parameters button
• Click into the Parameters field
• Using your keyboard – hit the CRTL + Z keys to ZOOM
• Scroll down to where you see the DELETE statements for each table
• Copy one of those statements

Delete Name_Address

From Purge_Ctrl_ie p,Name_Address n

Where p.STATUS = ‘D’ and

p.ID = n.ID

Go

• Paste the statement back in and change the table name to your user defined table name
• When all of the user defined demographic tables have been added, click the OK button
• Click the Save button

You now have an updated iMIS purge utility that includes all of your user defined demographic tables. Running or executing the purge is also very easy. You can do that by:

• Utilities>Reports and Queries
• Select Purge as your report type
• Select NEW purge utility you created – example: ACRONYM Membership Purge for MS SQL
• Click the Run button
• A warning message will appear, Click the Yes button to proceed

Now you can purge records that need to be purged from iMIS along with any of their user defined demographic information. But before you do there are a few tips, reminders and/or suggestions.

• Make a backup first - Any time you are doing a mass process in iMIS it is good to have a backup in case or problems.
• Verify your purge first - Many people on your staff maybe marking records for deletion, so running a report to verify the accuracy of these "purge" records is HUGE. Verify against your organization's business rules - we do not purge records with committee history, we do not purge records with meeting history within the last 5 years, etc.
• Verify for merge first - If you have a duplicate merge module, you may be able to merge some records instead of purging. These modules allow you to merge all of the history of duplicate records to the correct record as well as purge the duplicates. If you only purge the duplicates, some history may be lost.
• Purge regularly - This should become part of your normal database maintenance. If you purge regularly it will be easy to maintain. Doing this monthly gives you a small list of records to verify and purge versus if you did this every year or two years. Then it would be a much bigger project.