The importance of 'sameas' in Database Configuration

An often misused feature of Maximo Database Configuration is the ‘Same as Object’ and ‘Same as Attribute’ fields when defining custom database attributes.

To understand how this works lets consider the ASSET.LOCATION attribute. As you can see from the screenshot below, the LOCATION column of the ASSET table is defined ‘same as’ LOCATIONS.LOCATION’ field.

The direct effect of this is that if you change the size of the LOCATIONS.LOCATION field it will affect all the ‘sameas’ fields defined in other tables.

This is really important to have a consistent data model for your custom fields. Here is an SQL query to help identify missing same-as in the custom objects and attributes.

select objectname, attributename, maxtype, length, sameasobject, sameasattribute
from maxattributecfg
where objectname like 'XXX%' or attributename like 'XXX%'
order by attributename, sameasattribute;

Replace the ‘XXX’ with your custom prefix (hope you have one) and it will list all the custom attributes to be verified.