Telco Normalizes and Loads Legacy Data into Relational Formats

Figure 1 — Telco’s Original Architecture

Situation

A large telecommunications (telco) company based in Africa is servicing a growing user base, providing cell services, call detail record (CDR) billing, an online game show, and card recharging (talk minute reloading) on various applications with an existing replication engine on HPE NonStop systems.

Problem

Managing the billing application became difficult. The growing customer base made the billing application more compute-intensive and there was no graphical user interface (GUI) or simple point-and-click method to manage the application. The billing application’s controls were not user-friendly. The telco did not have a method of loading the HPE NonStop data changes into Teradata without interrupting the HPE NonStop Server’s existing operations. Taking the billing application offline to quiesce the database would mean lost revenue and disable customers from purchasing additional minutes. It would also mean a disruption to the telco’s internal billing processing. The telco needed a way to incorporate this data transformation and loading with its existing billing operations in one architecture.

Solution

• Use HPE NonStop Shadowbase Basic Data Integration Software, which includes HPE Shadowbase SOLV (Shadowbase Online Loading), to load the existing data from the HPE NonStop database into HPE Shadowbase ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) Toolkit, which flattens the data and presents it in flat files (Figure 2).
• Use the HPE Shadowbase Essentials (ETL Toolkit) to read the change data from the audit trail, and flatten the data into flat files.
  • Leverage HPE Shadowbase Data Integration (required, not shown) to add database change data into flat files.
• Use a third party ETL loader to load the data into Teradata.

Outcomes

Figure 2 — Final Architecture

• Powerful inflight transformations – The telco gained an architecture that captures inflight transactions and transforms the data-in-flight into flat files, which can be used by a third party loader, and then loaded into the new target format.
• Coexists with existing transformation operations – The application did not require any code changes and remained online the entire time.
• A hybrid architecture – This architecture enables HPE Shadowbase software to interoperate with third party ETL Loading tools.
• Enables new targets – The telco can utilize this method to load its data into any desired target database or application format required.

Note: Shadowbase also supports writing to comma-separated formats (CSV), any ODBC target platform or database, and any unsupported target environment accessible via HPE Shadowbase User Exits. For more information, see: Supported Databases and Platforms.

HPE Shadowbase Products of Interest

• HPE NonStop Shadowbase Essentials Software (BE446AC/QSA54V6)
• HPE NonStop Shadowbase Basic Data Integration Software (BE443AC/QSA51V6)
  • (Includes HPE NonStop Shadowbase Online Loading Software)

Contact us or your HPE Shadowbase representative, and learn how Shadowbase software will benefit you.

Further Reading

Related Case Studies:

• Cellular Provider Achieves Continuous Availability for Prepaid Calls
• Vodacom’s One Year Recovery

Related Solution Brief: HPE Shadowbase SOLV Product Suite Solution Brief

Related White Paper: HPE Shadowbase SOLV Product Suite — Online Database Loading, Copying, Synchronizing, and Unloading