What is Post Count counting? When is it considered safe to switch? (4327708)

Switch approval is set to manual. So user waited for a long time for the Post Count to slow down before switch because he thinks that there are incoming transactions but even after the switch, the activity count is zero which means no transactions. So what is Post count counting?

According to the User Guide
Post Count—This field displays the number of posting sessions that have occurred so far. (A posting session is a single execution of the stored procedure and OCI calls that are used to post live transactions to the copy table.) If the number for Post Count is greater than the number for Current, this means that QSA has attempted one or more posting sessions when there were no transactions to be posted.

The question is during the Live Reorg run, the post count keep on increasing but from the application, there is no activities related to that particular reorg table. As such, user are delaying the table switch before application shutdown to avoid any cancellation of batch jobs.

So in general, is it considered safe to switch if outstanding transactions is 0?

We have a session that runs in the background, checking to see if there are any changes that needed to be posted. The session that checks for changes has to wake up even if there are zero transactions, because we only know that there are zero transactions if we check.

The post count is the “posting sessions count” – the number of times we wake up to check. Transactions shows how many changes were applied by the posting session.

If outstanding transactions is zero, it is safe to switch. You don’t have to wait until the number is zero, it should just be small enough that we can catch up before we do the switch.