Exadata in Retail Presentation
April 9th, 2010 by Jon Mead
I recently gave a presentation at the Oracle Extreme Performance Data Warehousing Seminar about a project we have been working on with a client. The client is in the retail sector and the project involved a custom Data Warehouse built on Exadata, populated by CDC with reporting delivered using OBIEE. The presentation was positioned at a high level and aimed to look at the client’s business problem, the solution that was implemented and why Exadata was required.
The slides can be downloaded here – note they are about 1.3MB.
May 5th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Hi Jon,
This is all interesting stuff and looks just like the journey we took here over the last nine months. I work in a retail company implementing OBI EE on Exadata with a bespoke 11.2 warehouse schema (we started with the ORDM before dropping it in favour of a lighter bespoke approach).
I could not tell from your presentation as to whether you were doing intraday data refresh (every 1.5hrs) or end of day refresh that took 1.5hrs in a batch window overnight.
We were until very recently going to be doing intraday data refresh and neartime sales reporting on an hourly update basis until problems with the EPOS system caused failures in Logical Dataguard to the standby system we were using as source. Ultimately the business also decided that intraday sales reporting was more “toy than tool” so in some respects it made life easier all round.
Cheers,
Matt.
May 5th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Hi Matt
We used a daily batch but driven through change data capture rather than traditional batch extract. We could run it more frequently – but as you suggest it can be a questionable benefit to have sales numbers constantly changing for the report users :-) I feel that realtime is only worthwhile if the business gain benefit from the cost of doing it – and for some businesses knowing something a little sooner is not that great an asset.
Logical Dataguard and high volume EPOS are not always the best of companions. There are other techniques that could be used – Oracle GoldenGate is both fast and robust for example, and if your EPOS architecture is SOA based for example then message interception could be interesting to explore
May 5th, 2010 at 8:44 pm
Matt,
The business case to intra-day loads come into focus in the run up to Christmas. The company in question can get a really good feel for performance on an hour by hour basis, and may need to make changes on a similar timescale. Whether the architecture can cope with it is the next question…
Jon
May 6th, 2010 at 8:57 am
@Peter.
..indeed, I was having a chat with one of our Architects about goldengate and we are going to have a look into it in the next few weeks/months. Our EPOS is based on ATG and seemingly it can quite legally generate multiple singleton updates to a primary key component and effectively create more than one row with only one key which flaws Dataguard (the solution is to add another key column but tinkering with an out of the box product is a pain).
@Jon
..interesting, were were also looking into hourly sales performance across storefronts – one of the questions we never bottomed out was whether we would keep the whole value chain updated and therefore account for stock movement against the intraday sales movement. The question soon became one of “enterprise wide update” vs “sales only update” and it was felt that unless the users knew exactly what was going on we could quickly end up with some static EOD elements and some intraday elements due to update constraints, and a very confusing picture!
Matt.
May 13th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Re confusing picture – agreed. We were pretty much looking at having a separate subject area for this kind of reporting, and it was just pure volume, not cost/margin/stock type figures that a more daily grain.