OCMD for OLTP database ?

Question

Hi all,
Can we use OCDM for OLTP standard database (as a standard data model to standadize the OLTP schema model, such as sales, customer, billing) ? or OCDM use only for Data Warehouse system ?
Rgds.
VP.

Answer 1

Dear VP,
Sorry for the delay in answering your note.
OCDM is normally planned as Enterprise Data Warehouse, that stores relevant transactions from OLTP systems (Billing, CRM, Customer Care, Trouble Ticket, Point of Sales, Network Management or even Network Element statistics,...). To use OCDM as OLTP standard DB, you would use in fact only the foundation layer (atomic granularity) for the applications you want (while automatically benefiting from the analytics part).
I don't see any strong arguments against your idea, providing some assumptions and maybe "warnings":
- I assume you would develop your applications on top of OCDM. Leveraging an existing application would mean you would have to either adapt OCDM to fit the application or vice versa.
- The SID certification of OCDM over 130 business entities (ABEs) in 6 domains would insure the fact you could map most eTOM processes with your application.
- You can start in a small area, and extend slowly as requirement grows.
- From a use perspective, you should make sure the structure fits your expectation around history. A DWH does not like "update" (for performance reason). It stores the object and each status change. Hence, you might keep more data that what you would like, especially if you start updating events (like customer order). So you shall decide whether you will update or insert only but plan your hardware consequently (+ Information Lifetime Management to drop consequently old or useless data).
- From a data loading perspective, you will face the same issues as with a standard DWH. OCDM expects clean data. Therefore, you must do some data quality check and data cleansing in the staging area (and certainly adapt the default lookup values used by OCDM or provided by the data sources). A simple example: I can store raw CDRs in OCDM. But it will not load if the expected fields are not at the right place or if you have duplicated events, what can easily happen in raw CDRs!
- From a hardware perspective, depending on how big you plan your applications, Exadata could be ideal because it can support a mix load of complex and regular queries, on top of benefiting from the Hybrid Columnar Compression and other nice features.
- One advantage is that you could leverage by default the analytics part into your system (Segmentation, CLV, sentiment analysis, prepaid and postpaid churn, targeted campaigns, call center statistics, revenue and traffic forecast...) on top of having the tools to further develop your own analytics to support the process.
- You should also think upfront about dealing with the regular (at least once a year) OCDM version upgrade and about support. We can support OCDM as product as it is sold, not your application on top.
Feel free to contact OCDM Product Mngt team directly (contact Oracle CGBU or Tech sales rep) for specific development agreement if you see further interest in such development.
Best regards
Axel.