Map Legacy Data Into Staging Tables
This section provides some high level discussion about mapping legacy data to the system's staging tables. Refer to The Staging Tables for details about the staging tables in the system.
Note: 
Recommendation. You can use any method you prefer to load Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing data from your legacy application. However, we recommend that you investigate your database's mass load utility (as opposed to using insert statements) as the mechanism to load the staging tables. In addition, we strongly recommend that you disable the indexes on these tables before populating these tables and then enable the indexes after populating these tables.
Populating Characteristic Tables. There are many maintenance objects that include a characteristic table used to capture miscellaneous information about the object, e.g. Person, Account, Service Agreement, etc. Most of these tables include an indexed column used when searching by characteristic value called Search Characteristic Value. During conversion and depending on the type of characteristic, this column must be populated as follows:
• Predefined: Populate search characteristic value with the contents of the characteristic value column converted to upper case.
• Ad hoc: Populate search characteristic value with the first 50 bytes of the ad hoc characteristic value column converted to upper case.
• Foreign key: Populate search characteristic value by concatenating the values of each foreign key characteristic value column to a maximum of 50 bytes.