Files & Tables

Colleague was originally designed to run on the multivalue file-based database UniData (part of the U2 suite), so while most Colleague installations now run on some kind of SQL backend, Colleague UI, Ellucian documentation, and Colleague Studio source code may refer to tables as “files” and rows as “records”. For example, the “PERSON file” is actually the person table in the Colleague SQL database, and the WHERE.USED.FILES valcode (see VAL) refers to shorthand names of tables, not files. Due to this mixing of terminology, “file” may also refer to actual directories and files on the Colleague server where non-obvious, such as _HOLD_.

_HOLD_

The _HOLD_ directory lives under apphome and contains per-user folders where they can store whatever they want. If it can be exported from Colleague, it can likely be saved to _HOLD_ instead. Most automatic processes write to _HOLD_ and use it as a cache, unless specified otherwise. Users can then view these files or export them at a later date. UTFB lets you read the output of files without exporting them.