Calendars

Configure calendars and understand the internal processes that occur during the computation of calendars.

Before you begin, learn about calendars by reading the general description that is in the online help. Contact IBM® Support if you have questions.

  • Calendars are based on periods like daily, weekly, monthly, yearly while counters are defined on a shifting window, for example, the last 24 hours.
  • Calendars are less flexible than counters because calendars provide only frequency, total amount, average amount, and standard deviation for each period.
  • Calendars require RAM and disk. For more information, see Memory usage.
  • Calendars let you combine periods, for example, Max daily amount; Average total daily amount; Total amount current month / Total amount previous month, and so on.
  • Calendars are used mainly for compliance and monitoring purposes, or example, Number of purchases of merchant x in current month >= 3 * Maximum monthly purchases of last 12 months.
  • Calendars are a good alternative if real-time evaluation of transactions hits performance limits, for example, on accounts with tens of thousands transactions per day. They can also be helpful long periods of multiple months are used, which can hit storage limits with counters. Counters are limited to what is stored in RAM or disk.
  • Calendars were previously known as profiles.

Computation internals

The computation of calendars consists of three steps:

  1. Run a rollover, if needed
  2. Update periods
  3. Fill calendar outputs

Steps one and three are always run before model components like rules are run. Step two, updating the periods, can be configured to run either before or after the execution of model components. In the latter case, calendar outputs do not consider the values of the currently processed transaction.

Flowchart for calendar steps

A calendar is not evaluated if the computation conditions of the index that the calendar is attached to are not fulfilled. If the insertion conditions of the index are not fulfilled and an index node for the index attribute doesn’t exist, the calendar also won’t be evaluated. If a node already exists, the insertion conditions have no influence on the calendar evaluation. Transaction query results show (0) for calendar outputs whose calendars were not evaluated.