Retained Logic vs Progress Override vs Actual Dates

What the field is

Oracle's own sentence for each choice is worth quoting directly.

• Retained Logic: "the remaining duration of a progressed activity is not scheduled until all of its predecessors are finished."
• Progress Override: "the schedule ignores network logic and allows the activity to progress without delay."
• Actual Dates: "backward and forward passes are calculated using actual dates."

The remainder of an in-progress activity is the part that still has to sit somewhere after the Data Date. Retained Logic keeps that remainder waiting on open predecessors. Progress Override lets it continue without waiting. Actual Dates feeds actual dates into both passes.

The XER stores related flags on SCHEDOPTIONS — sched_retained_logic and sched_progress_override — but Oracle's column map does not document how those two flags combine to encode the three-way UI choice. That encoding is unverified. Do not invent it.

What it is not

It is not a relationship type, not lag, and not "out of sequence" as a stored activity flag. The option is a project schedule setting. It does not rewrite TASKPRED. A related but separate option on the same Settings page, Calculate Start-to-Start lag from, chooses between Early Start and Actual Start. That is independent of the three-way retained-logic choice.

Training write-ups from Ten Six, Eastwood Harris, and Trauner add practical color: Retained Logic is the default in many databases; Progress Override often shortens the remaining work; Actual Dates is described as behaving like Retained Logic on an in-progress out-of-sequence activity and like Progress Override toward successors of a finished out-of-sequence predecessor. Those extra distinctions do not appear in the Oracle settings page cited here. Label them as training, not as Oracle documentation.