IMPORTANT: GE Digital does not support any modifications made to database tables directly or via third-party tools. Do not write data directly into or change data in database tables through any third-party tool.
Only access, add, or modify data related to GE Digital products via approved GE Digital procedures and processes. Accessing, adding, or modifying data by any other method may result in data corruption, and may void your GE Digital product warranty. For more information, consult a member of the GE Digital Professional Services department.
In GE Digital APM, a family is an organizational unit that helps classify data in the database. GE Digital APM uses two types of families: entity families and relationship families. Families serve to organize information within the database and to help end users locate and classify similar data.
Each GE Digital APM family has a corresponding table in the database. Family tables are used to store all the data belonging to a given family, where each row in a family table corresponds to a record in that family.
GE Digital APM provides many families, both entity families and relationship families, in the baseline GE Digital APM database. In addition, you can create your own families. You can create families as you need to categorize all of your records and provide appropriate names for classifying the type of data that they will store for your organization.
Family Hierarchy
In GE Digital APM, entity families can be organized into a hierarchy so that one family is defined as a subfamily of another family. By creating a hierarchy, you can enhance clarity.
When you look at the baseline GE Digital APM database, you will see that some families are further divided into subfamilies. For example, the Recommendation family contains several subfamilies that define the types of Recommendation records that you can create.
As you configure your database, you will need to look at all of the different groupings of items that you will manage in GE Digital APM. Then you need to divide these items and name each group, which will become your families. Next, you need to look for situations where one item is a type of another item. In some cases, you may want to create a family that helps form your hierarchy but to which you would not directly save records. In the end, you will probably have a number of families.
Consider an example where you create three families: Failure, Equipment Failure, Shutdown. These three families are distinctly different, but they also share some commonality: a shutdown is a type of equipment failure and equipment failure is a type of failure.
If you set up your hierarchy so that all of these families are stored at the root level along with all other families, there would be no connection between one family and another to organize the families logically. A better choice would be to set up families and subfamilies.
Each root level will be useful for defining data that is common to its sub-levels. In addition, the metadata is well ordered based on the type of data that is being collected. Since it is not an easy task to change designations after the other metadata elements have been created, you will probably find it easier to organize your database on a paper prior to creating it within the Configuration Manager.
Copyright © 2018 General Electric Company. All rights reserved.