Integration Guide for Oracle Billing Insight > Integrating Oracle Billing Insight With Oracle BRM >

About Using BRM Provider and BRM AQAdapter to Load Oracle BRM Data

You use the BRM Provider and BRM AQAdapter tools to integrate Oracle BRM with Oracle Billing Insight and to load and synchronize data in a live production environment.

About BRM Provider

BRM Provider consists of a set of Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) processes and a pre-staging schema. The set of packages, load plans, and scenarios load billing data from the Oracle BRM server into the Oracle Billing Insight database. The processes first move Oracle BRM data to a pre-staging area, then transforms and loads the data into Oracle Billing Insight staging, and then moves it into the Oracle Billing Insight production tables.

The pre-staging schema contains over thirty BRM tables, a database link to connect to the Oracle BRM database, and data loading control tables. For details, see Integration Extension Points.

There are four types of billing-related data in Oracle Billing Insight, and each type of data has a dedicated extract and load process for loading Oracle BRM data:

• Master
• Postpaid
• Unbilled
• Prepaid

Each extract and load process from Oracle BRM to Oracle Billing Insight is based on a specific start timestamp (inclusive) and end timestamp (exclusive). Only one data load process is allowed at a time.

You can use one of the following methods to extract the billing data from Oracle BRM using BRM Provider:

• Directly from the Oracle BRM server, recommended for a low data volume server.
• From a backup server replicated using Oracle GoldenGate, recommended for a high data volume and performance-bound Oracle BRM server.

BRM AQAdapter

BRM AQAdapter processes the following real-time events generated by Oracle BRM, synchronizing or loading the data to Oracle Billing Insight using RESTful Web services:

• Account Provisioning. Companies, billing accounts, or service agreements are created or updated in Oracle BRM, and BRM AQAdapter provisions the data to Oracle Billing Insight. (BRM AQAdapter also creates or updates the corresponding billing hierarchies as needed.)
• Payment Synchronization. Payment transactions, new credit card accounts, and payment contacts created or updated in Oracle BRM are synchronized by BRM AQAdapter to Oracle Billing Insight. (Payment transactions for both postpaid and prepaid update as external payments in Oracle Billing Insight.)
• Monthly Billing. You can schedule BRM Provider to initiate loading postpaid data from Oracle BRM to Oracle Billing Insight whenever the bill utility is run in Oracle BRM. The pin_bill_day utility triggers the custom billRun event, and BRM AQAdapter processes the loading of postpay billing data from Oracle BRM to Oracle Billing Insight.

BRM AQAdapter runs as a Java client outside of the Oracle WebLogic container.

Oracle BRM publishes events using the Synchronization Queue DM and the Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) framework, which consists of the event notification system and the Payload Generator External Module (EM).

The Synchronization Queue DM and EAI framework work together to publish changes to a central Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) database queue. Oracle Billing Insight retrieves interested events from the specified Oracle AQ.

A dedicated event queue for integration is created in the Oracle BRM database. Only subscribed events publish into the event queue by Oracle BRM. BRM AQAdapter uses Spring JMS and Spring Data JDBC Extensions to retrieve events from AQ. The BRM AQAdapter event handler processes the events using Oracle Billing Insight Web service APIs. For more information, see Web Services Reference for Oracle Billing Insight.

About Load Management Control Tables

Oracle Billing Insight uses the following load management tables with the Oracle BRM data load processes:

• EDX_INTG_PROVIDER_LOAD_CTRL. This table contains one entry for each type of data to track the start timestamp of the last load run.
• EDX_INTG_PROVIDER_LOAD. This table contains one entry for each load run to track the type of data load, the start and end timestamp, and the load status.
• EDX_INTG_PROVIDER_LOG. This table stores detailed log information for each load run, including load ID, event type (info, warning, or error), timestamp, affected table, row inserted, and log messages.