Improving Rated Event Loader Performance

10 Improving Rated Event Loader Performance

Learn how to improve the performance of the Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) Rated Event Loader (RE Loader).

This information applies only to the original processing method. To tune the performance of the Rated Event Manager (for the new methods), see the tuning parameters in "Configuring the RE Manager and ECE RE Manager Plug-in REM.properties Files".

Topics in this chapter:

Improving RE Loader Performance

You can improve your RE Loader system performance by:

Increasing the Number of Account Balance and Bill Item Updates

RE Loader performance can be improved by increasing the number of account balance, bill item, and journal updates performed before committing the transaction.

You can modify the pre-update batch size and update batch size in the Infranet.properties file to specify how many updates to perform before committing the transaction. For example, if updater_batch_size is set to 5, the stored procedure commits the transaction after every five updates. Increasing the number of updates might increase performance, but the updated account balances, bill items, and journals are not available until the transaction is committed. The default batch_size value is 5.

Note:

Setting the batch_size value too high can result in deadlock. The value for best performance depends on your system configuration. You should test to find the best value for your system.

To change the preupdater_batch_size and updater_batch_size values:

Open the BRM_home/apps/pin_rel/Infranet.properties file in a text editor.

Note:

If you have already set up your RE Loader processing directories, make sure you edit the Infranet.properties file in each directory.
If necessary, edit the infranet.connection entry to point to the correct database.

For example:
```
infranet.connection=pcp://root.0.0.0.1:password@localhost:37180/service/pcm_client
```
Specify the preupdater batch size value in the preupdater_batch_size entry.

For example:
```
infranet.rel.default.preupdater_batch_size = 8
```
Specify the updater batch size value in the updater_batch_size entry:
```
infranet.rel.default.updater_batch_size = 8
```
Save and close the file.

Turning Off Index Verification to Improve Database Loading Performance

By default, RE Loader automatically verifies that your indexes are correct before loading data into the BRM database. This extra step helps you discover configuration errors when testing your system in a development environment.

In production systems, however, you should turn off index verification to improve database loading performance.

When configured to verify indexes, RE Loader performs the following before it runs the SQL Loader utility:

Checks whether the indexes to load are partitioned, local, and usable.
Performs one of the following:
- If the indexes are incorrect, RE Loader aborts the loading process and logs which indexes encountered problems.
- If the indexes are correct, RE Loader runs the SQL Loader utility to load events into the database.

When configured to skip verification, RE Loader automatically runs the SQL Loader utility to load events into the database. When the indexes are incorrect, SQL Loader fails and RE Loader logs only that the database load utility encountered an error.

To turn off index verification:

Open the BRM_home/apps/pin_rel/Infranet.properties file in a text editor.
Set the Infranet.rel.validate_indexes entry to False:
```
Infranet.rel.validate_indexes = False
```
Save and close the file.

Turning Off Database Verification to Improve Processing Performance

By default, RE Loader automatically verifies that it is loading events into the correct database schema by validating the database number in the event record file's first account object with the PCM database number. This extra step helps you discover configuration errors when testing your multischema system in a development environment.

In production systems, however, you should turn off database verification to improve RE Loader database loading performance.

To turn off database verification:

Open the BRM_home/apps/pin_rel/Infranet.properties file in a text editor.
Set the infranet.rel.validate_dbnumber entry to False:
```
infranet.rel.validate_dbnumber = False
```
Save and close the file.

Pruning Your RE Loader Control and Audit Tables

RE Loader control and audit tables grow indefinitely, so you should prune them periodically to increase system performance and reduce memory usage. To make pruning easier, you can use the RE Loader purge_batch_rel_objects stored procedure, which automatically prunes the tables for you.

To prune your control and audit tables:

Connect to the Oracle database with SQL*Plus:

sqlplus system@DatabaseAlias
Enter password: password

Enter the following command to run the stored procedure:
```
SQL> pin_rel.purge_batch_rel_objects(int:Number)
```
where Number specifies how many days worth of data to keep in the tables.
Type exit to exit SQL*Plus.