Abstract: A method of updating a supply plan used to process customer requests in an available-to-promise (ATP) system. In one embodiment the method comprises updating a model of a supply chain process for one or more products sold by the ATP system and copying a current supply plan used by the ATP system to process customer requests to create a second supply plan. Thereafter, a first plurality of customer requests is received and orders from the requests are processed by the ATP system against the current supply plan while running the updated model of the supply chain process with the second supply plan as part of a process that creates a new supply plan. After the new supply plan is created, the new supply plan is synchronized with the old supply plan by synchronizing orders from the first plurality of customer requests scheduled against the old supply plan into the new plan while order promising continues against the old plan.

Abstract: A consistent set of data is supplied to a software application from databases. When a particular set of data is identified, a first process is requested to obtain a snapshot time from a database server associated with the first database. The snapshot time causes all subsequent reads of the first database by the first process to return data that reflects a database state associated with the snapshot time. A first set of data in the first database is locked in order to produce a copy of data from a first database. After locking the first set of data, a plurality of processes are requested to obtain snapshot times from a database server associated with the first database. The snapshot times cause all subsequent reads of the first database by the plurality of processes to return data from the first database as of the snapshot times.

Abstract: A consistent set of data is supplied to a software application from databases. When a particular set of data is identified, a first process is requested to obtain a snapshot time from a database server associated with the first database. The snapshot time causes all subsequent reads of the first database by the first process to return data that reflects a database state associated with the snapshot time. A first set of data in the first database is locked in order to produce a copy of data from a first database. After locking the first set of data, a plurality of processes are requested to obtain snapshot times from a database server associated with the first database. The snapshot time caused all subsequent reads of the first database by the plurality of processes to return data from the first database as of the snapshot times.