Or, I made a change to a record, but it’s not showing on a report!
EPIC is a very powerful and easy-to-use administration system for all things DiSC and The Five Behaviors, but it does have one annoying quirk: Some changes to EPIC records are not immediately reflected in available reports. This is because changes are “warehoused”, meaning these updates are stored temporarily in a separate location before being written to the main database.
Why is data warehousing used?
Data warehousing improves system performance. When it comes to reading and writing data, it’s faster to read data than it is to write it. EPIC is built on a monster of a database (every online assessment ever created!) and to optimize its performance, writes to its database are deferred until times of low system load.
It's a little like taking a moment to respond to an email between meetings (or, let's be honest, at a slow time during a meeting).
See the article Data Warehousing in EPIC if you’re curious about this.
When is it used?
The deep operational aspects of EPIC aren’t published, but I can give some examples of when I have run into this. This might explain times when you have run into similar situations.
Example 1: Creating bulk Catalyst Access Codes
Some of you may be familiar with “extract files”. This is a way to create bulk access codes that can be downloaded and given to respondents later, rather than emailing assessment invitations to assigned users. Catalyst doesn’t support extract files, but it is possible to create Catalyst Access Codes in bulk (see the Article: EPIC Hack: Creating Bulk Access Codes for Catalyst). When Access Codes are created in this way, it can take up to a few hours for these records to appear in a Pending Credits report.
Example 2: Changing Catalyst Organizations
If you change the Catalyst Organization for a record, and then a run report that is filtered on the newly-assigned Organization, the record will not immediately appear in the report.
Example 3: Changing Folders and Subfolders
Similar to changing the Catalyst Organization (but unrelated! See the article Catalyst Organization versus Folders), if you edit a record and change its storage location and then run a report that includes the new folder, the record won’t immediately be there. The same thing happens when you move records via the Folder Maintenance function.
Then how do I know that the change was made??
Fortunately, the Edit Existing Records function (found in the Manage Reports menu) always pulls the most recent data. So, the easiest way to find a changed record is to locate it there, using the search screen (see the article The Search Screen: Your Best Friend in EPIC).
And now that the search results can be downloaded (see the article Download EPIC Learner Data), you can create your own custom reports that always use the most current data.