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About Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) Survivorship Rules

Survivorship rules are an automated means of doing the following:

• Controlling the quality of customer data stored in Oracle Customer Hub (UCM)

  Multiple systems connect to Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) with record update and insert requests.

• Making sure that Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) presents the most trusted information contributed by each system

Administrators can create and use survivorship rules to govern which updates from which external systems can be trusted at the field level based on the key criteria. Survivorship rules use attribute groups that determine the set of fields to be evaluated by the survivorship rule. The rules use comparison criteria, such as the confidence level of the publishing system or the most recent published data to evaluate whether inputs from given external systems can be used to update Oracle Customer Hub (UCM).

There is an implicit default attribute group which includes the fields that are not explicitly defined in an attribute group definition. Each survivorship rule has a default criterion. If there is no explicit rule definition for a certain attribute group (including the default attribute group), then the default criterion applies to determine whether an external system can update Oracle Customer Hub (UCM).

CAUTION:  Do not modify or delete the names of the default attribute groups for the Account, Contact, or Household objects. If these names are modified, make sure they match the values in the UCM Survivorship Engine User Properties: DefaultAttrGrpName_Account, DefaultAttrGrpName_Contact, or DefaultAttrGrpName_Household.

About Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) Child Survivorship

Child survivorship allows administrators to set survivorship rules for child entities of records, such as personal address, financial account, email, phone and so on. Administrators can also set survivorship rules for custom child entities.

Comparison Methods Used by the Survivorship Rules

The survivorship rules use the following comparison methods to evaluate the quality of the object fields associated with an attribute group:

• Recent. Compares the date for the field data of the object attribute group against the date of the updating message. The most recent data survives.
• History. Compares the date for the field data of the object attribute group against the date of the updating message. The oldest data survives.
• Source. Compares the confidence level of the external system that contributed data to attribute group fields in the object against the confidence level of the external system of the updating message. The data with the highest confidence level survives.
• External. Indicates the attribute group settings that enable you to configure any supported rules engine to set specific survivorship rules.
• Master. The Master Wins rule stipulates that the values stored in Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) will always win over the incoming record, or in the case of merge, the surviving record's value will always win over the victim's.
• Slave. The Slave Wins rule stipulates that the values sent by external application into Oracle Customer Hub (UCM) will always win over the values in the existing best version record, or in the case of merge, the victim record's values will be retained over the surviving record's.

Restrictions When Defining the Survivorship Rules

The following restrictions and recommendations must be considered when defining survivorship rules:

• Use only one active rule for each object, although administrators can define multiple rules for each object (account, contact).
• Include each individual field within a given object in one attribute group definition. Otherwise, conflicts might occur when the survivorship rules are evaluated.

NOTE:  You create survivorship rules for primary objects in the UCM Rule Set Attribute Group view, and use the UCM Entity Rule Set view to create survivorship rules for child objects.

For information on the process of creating survivorship rules, see Process of Creating Survivorship Rules.