Ashnik helps reduce reporting time by 88% for a leading telecommunication company in Malaysia

88% reduction in time needed for reporting application for one of Malaysia’s largest telecom providers

The Customer:

The customer is a leading Malaysian converged telecommunications, broadband and 4G service provider. It is one of the four largest telecom groups in Malaysia.

The Challenge:

The business team wanted to get certain reports every day morning by 9 am, instead they were getting the reports in the late afternoon. This was impacting the decision making.

The Solution:

Ashnik team proposed EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server for reporting database. xDB replication server from EnterpriseDB was proposed to be the solution for replication. There were several highlights of the solution.

The Benefits:

The Oracle compatibility features that came with Postgres implementation made the migration quite easy and smooth. The functions and procedures could be migrated without any significant changes.

The Customer

The customer is a Malaysian converged telecommunications, broadband and 4G service provider. It is one of the four largest telecom groups in Malaysia.

The Challenge

The business team wanted to get certain reports everyday morning by 9am, instead they were getting the reports in the late afternoon. This was impacting the decision making.

On the technical side, the reports were being pulled off from OLTP database which would contend with the production application queries. This does not only slow down the response to reporting query but also put an overhead on application response.

the challenge

Though offloading the reporting application to a secondary DB server was the obvious solution, the real challenge was in designing the replication solution that can keep Primary and Secondary database in sync for Reporting purposes. Below were some key challenges regarding replication setup –

  1. Cost of having another Oracle database License
  2. Costly Replication tool/solution
  3. Logical replication was needed to minimize the changes and tables which would be required to be replicated
  4. Replication required to be scheduled to propagate changes after closure of daily operations
  5. There was no primary key on the tables that were to be replicated and hence implementing change data capture was difficult

The Solution

Ashnik team proposed EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server for reporting database. xDB replication server from EnterpriseDB was proposed to be the solution for replication. Key highlights of the solution-

  1. Using EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server as reporting database avoids huge cost of Oracle License
  2. xDB replication server is a bundled product with EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus Enterprise Edition and hence no additional cost incurred on replication solution
  3. Oracle data was migrated to Postgres Plus using migration toolkit that comes along with Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
  4. Stored procedures and functions in Oracle were migrated using Migration Toolkit. This reduced the effort and cost of migration significantly.
  5. A solution was designed to capture daily changes in a shadow table based on timestamp at Primary Oracle Server
  6. The data to be replicated was reduced by avoiding binary columns. Views were created on source database on primary tables (without including binary tables) and the views were replicated using snapshot mode
  7. xDB replication server allowed scheduling the replication job
  8. Reports are now being pulled from the Postgres Plus Advanced Server database

The Benefits

The Oracle compatibility features provided by EnterpriseDB made the migration quite easy and smooth. The functions and procedures could be migrated without any significant changes. The replication solution design mitigated the initial challenges. Currently, the customer is using Postgres Plus Advanced server for pulling reports and the reports are out for management reviews well in time. Additionally the replication is scheduled to replicate changes during off peak hours and hence OLTP transactions are not impacted. The Oracle server now is dedicated for OLTP workload. The end customer has been able to achieve all this in a fraction of total cost of a separate reporting database in Oracle DB. The reports that used to take 8 hours to generate now are made available in 1 hour.