Case Studies
How do we do it?
Download this PDF and find out!
Case Studies
Enkitec and Oracle Streams an Instant Success at Transport Tracking
Business Problem
A large Third Party Logistics (3PL) provider supplied transportation services to several major retailers. These retailers needed to know the status of their shipments on a constantly updated basis to help support their sales and promotional activities.
Unfortunately, the 3PL's reporting system was not equipped to provide such a constant data stream. To ensure that orders could be placed and verified on a timely basis, it was important to minimize the load on their online transaction processing (OLTP) application. To manage the load, the 3PL would move data from the OLTP system to a customer reporting data warehouse each night. While this process did manage the load on the OLTP system, it also meant that customer reporting data would be one day old at best. And that was no longer acceptable to the 3PL's retail customers.
Solution
In order to satisfy both performance requirements of the OLTP system and customer reporting needs, Enkitec implemented Oracle Streams to move data from the OLTP system into the data warehouse in near real time. Oracle Streams moves data by accessing the Redo Logs as opposed to implementing a two phase commit. This relieves the OLTP system from processing the data movement and allows for near real-time updates of the data warehouse. Although the data warehouse has similarities to the OLTP in structure, the Streams process is used to restructure the data on the way in to the data warehouse to make it easier to access the data when the customer needs it.
Benefits
Following the implementation of Oracle’s Streams, this 3PL was able to offer its customer base near real-time reporting without sacrificing performance of the OLTP system. This capability makes the 3PL's services more attractive to customers as they can place orders and then begin tracking them almost immediately.
