Administration Guide for Oracle Self-Service E-Billing > Creating Applications and Jobs >

About Data Protection

Oracle Self-Service E-Billing works with Oracle Data Guard to provide solutions for data protection and recovery from hardware crash or data corruption.

Oracle Self-Service E-Billing uses two database instances for data storage, one for storing historical data for analytics (OLAP) and another for transactional data (OLTP). Certain transactional data is created from the OLTP side of the database and is synchronized with OLAP. The synchronization allows real-time analysis based on the changes made in OLTP, of which hierarchy structure is one example. Hierarchy can be created by online users. The newly created hierarchy is stored in the OLTP database and then pushed to OLAP. The analytic reports then can be generated based on the newly updated hierarchy structure.

It is possible to set up a primary database and a standby database for both the OLAP instance and the OLTP instance. Each database works independently with Oracle Data Guard. The integrity of the data is guaranteed in Oracle Self-Service E-Billing through the design of the ETL process as well as by using distributed database transaction management.

Data created from the ETL process is first loaded to the OLAP database. After the data is committed and validated in the OLAP database, some key data is populated into the OLTP exchange tables. From there onward, the ETL process continues to populate the OLTP production tables. In cases where the OLAP or OLTP databases go down, the counterpart of each database keeps the data in its entirety.

For data created by online users, the distributed database transactions are used to guarantee data integrity. If one of the databases goes down, no new data is written to either of the databases.