topic Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet in Windchill

Put your PDMLink system on a diet

AntonioVillanue — Wed, 02 May 2018 08:39:43 GMT

This is a two part repost of a article I wrote on the old site (2010). If you are dealing with sluggish workspaces and are managing massive family tables, this is a must read. We were able to realize massive gains in workspace times with just simple maintenance of our family tables.

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

dschenken — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 06:13:45 GMT

The answer is for PTC to fix Windchill to properly handle family tables, not to require users to have workarounds.

Has this experiment been re-run for Creo X and Windchill XX?

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

AntonioVillanue — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 10:55:31 GMT

I have been using Creo 2 for a while with Windchill 9.1. It worked for that. I have not tested it with 10.2 but I suspect that not much has changed. Yes, they could improve things but I believe the data model is correct. The independent pieces could be improved to work better (workspaces, FT, deletion and purging). "Working to spec" is not an acceptable answer. I suspect that this is a rare enough occurrence to not warrant resources.

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

BenLoosli — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 14:18:03 GMT

While I can see merit in the statistics about family table size, I disagree with the 'solution'.

We are building family tables of all available hardware options for common hardware items. We want ourt usres to be able to pull any part into an assembly without creating a new one. I have many familt tables of screws that go from #0 to 1-1/2 in diameter and 1/8 to 6 inches in length. It takes a while to build these tables, but it allows us to have them available at anytime. Will we use all of these instances, I doubt it. My guess is that we may only use 5% of the almost 10,000 instances I have built so far.

If there is a problem with the way Windchill handles family tables in a workspace for retrieval, or removal, then PTC needs to look at their programmers to find the solution. The use of family tables is important for consistency in part naming and minimizing all of the one-off parts being created. I spent 4 months last year cleaning up part description parameters on individual parts that we would not put in family tables at this time. That may change if I can justify the time spent to do the work. For now we use family tables for off-the-shelf hardwrae items: screws, bolts, washers, nuts, rivets, etc.

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

AntonioVillanue — Mon, 04 Sep 2017 02:34:28 GMT

I agree on you points about the benefits of family tables. Yes. I would say that through the releases, speed of workspace operations has improved dramatically, orders of magnitude. I will rerun my experiment in 10.2 and post the results. I can say that from a programmer point of view, any loop that touches a data set involving 1000+ entries is going to slow things down. Imagine if their operation is O(n^3)!. I just wasn't willing to wait for PTC to get around to fixing the issue.

Another thing we noticed if you had to carry all sizes, engineers will pick, well, all sizes. This means higher part costs carrying inventory only used once. This can vary with industry but we are not talking about 0.05 fasteners in High Rel space flight. Then there is the touch labor. Our other goal was to move toward fewers sizes and more standard part reuse.

Again, agree on points. Lets see what new data says.

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

HamsterNL — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 11:19:28 GMT

Interesting.

We are in the process of moving from WildFire 4.0 and Intralink 9.0 to Creo 4.0 and Windchill. Currently, we have created our own fasteners library, where all fasteners are in an Interchange Assembly. This allows the engineers (and our automation) to swap any bolt/nut/washer/plug for any bolt/nut/washer/plug (yes, you read that right).

We have added parameters to indicate which fasteners are preferred, so our mapkeys can automaticly show the users a filtered list of fasteners they may use.

Our library is relatively small, so that's the upside for us 🙂

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

Pascal_Brunet — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:46:51 GMT

Hello Antonio,

Thank you for sharing your feedback. It is still interesting and relevant in 2026.
The URL links you shared don't work anymore. Is it possible to get access to your sql scripts?

@BenLoosli Fore sure.. PTC has to improve performances of their solution and they did it during the past years but it's still not enough if designers use family tables to manage variants of an assembly. PTC published some best practices like keep family tables small.. but i didn't find solution to monitor this and to be notified.

BR,
Pascal

Re: Put your PDMLink system on a diet

avillanueva — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:04:28 GMT

Ah, some of my old work (from personal account). Here is a link to Part 2.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill/My-system-on-a-diet-a-look-back-Part-2/m-p/482600

Let me know what you need.