This chapter describes maintenance tasks for managing Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management Elastic Charging Engine (ECE) data stored in the Oracle NoSQL Database.
Online and offline usage-request processing results in rated events. ECE persists rated event data in the Oracle NoSQL Database for the following purposes:
Temporary persistence
ECE persists rated event data to the Oracle NoSQL Database temporarily until it is sent to another system for long-term persistence.
For example, rated event data is persisted in the Oracle NoSQL Database for a short time before it is sent to Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) for long-term persistence so that network operators can use the stored data for auditing purposes.
You can configure the amount of time to store the rated event data in the Oracle NoSQL Database and when to purge it from the Oracle NoSQL Database when it is no longer needed. See "Purging Rated Events from the Oracle NoSQL Database" for information about managing ECE data in the Oracle NoSQL database.
Performance
For maintaining optimal performance, ECE charging servers use temporary data in memory when processing online and offline usage requests. The rated event data that results from online and offline usage-request processing is held for a very short period in a dedicated Coherence cache before it is persisted in the Oracle NoSQL Database and expired from the Coherence cache.
Storage of rated event data for the generation of Rated Event (RE) Loader files
ECE Rated Event Formatter formats the rated event data from the Oracle NoSQL Database as BRM CDR files. The BRM Rated Event (RE) Loader loads the BRM CDR files into the BRM database to update customer account balances.
Duplicate usage request detection upon a partial ECE cluster failure
Oracle NoSQL Database detects and deletes duplicate rated event information if sent by the ECE charging servers. For example, when an ECE charging server node fails after having sent rated event data to the Oracle NoSQL Database, the node will resend the rated event data to the Oracle NoSQL Database upon startup. Oracle NoSQL Database will override the existing data to prevent duplicate data entries.
Data redundancy of rated event data is achieved in both ECE charging server nodes as well as in the Oracle NoSQL Database. To handle an ECE charging server node failure, you can configure multiple nodes on which to create a backup copy of the rated event data stored on the failed node; this kind of data redundancy can also be configured within Oracle NoSQL Database.
See the Oracle Coherence documentation for general information about Coherence and availability.
See the Oracle NoSQL Database documentation for information about the Oracle NoSQL database and availability.
See "Configuring Charging-Server Health Thresholds" for information about configuring ECE for availability in the cluster.
Rated events are purged from the Oracle NoSQL Database by Rated Event Formatter. For information about purging rated events from Oracle NoSQL Database, see the following topics:
After the Rated Event Formatter is started, it continuously purges rated events from Oracle NoSQL Database based on how you configure it. By default, Rated Event Formatter purges the rated events immediately after it has processed them (a rated event is written as an RE Loader record before it can be purged).
Depending on your business needs, you can purge rated events from the Oracle NoSQL Database immediately after they are processed by Rated Event Formatter or retain them for a period of time after they are processed. For example, you can retain them for an hour if legal requirements mandate that, or retain them for thirty minutes to give another program time to get data from the rated events before they are purged.
To configure how rated events are purged from Oracle NoSQL database:
Access the ECE MBeans:
Log on to the driver machine.
Start the ECE charging servers (if they are not started).
Start a JMX editor, such as JConsole, that enables you to edit MBean attributes.
Connect to the ECE charging server node set to start CohMgt = true in the ECE_home/oceceserver/config/eceTopology.conf file.
The eceTopology.conf file also contains the host name and port number for the node.
In the editor's MBean hierarchy, expand the ECE Configuration node.
Expand charging.ratedEventFormatters.Instance_Name, where Instance_Name is the name of the instance you want to configure.
Expand Attributes.
Set the retainDuration attribute to the number of seconds to wait before purging rated events.
Use Elastic Charging Controller to stop and restart the Rated Event Formatter instances that you configured.
For information about stopping and starting Rated Event Formatter instances, see the discussion about starting and stopping ECE in BRM Elastic Charging Engine System Administrator's Guide.
The Rated Event Formatter instance purges the rated events and writes log information to the Rated Event Formatter log file.
For more information about configuring Rated Event Formatter, see the discussion of implementing ECE with BRM in BRM Elastic Charging Engine Implementation Guide.