Stu's Braindump

The "My Oracle Support" Community Customer Care and Billing page is now available at https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt/community/customer_care_and_billing for all registered "My Oracle Support" users.

Oracle Utilities Framework 2.2.0 SP6 (Patch number 9042811) and Customer Care & Billing 2.2.0 SP6 (Patch number 9042819) are now available for download from My Oracle Support. 

A couple of handy My Oracle Support (Metalink) links for TUGBU customers... ID 804664.1 - Important Patches for Customer Care & Billing V2.1.0 ID 804612.1 - Important Patches for Customer Care & Billing V2.2.0 ID 804706.1 - Important Patches for Enterprise Taxation Management V2.1.5

I have generated the following slide in an attempt to ease some of the confusion around what each of the various budget subsystems does in CC&B. It should be noted that in the past we have 'enhanced' the Direct Debit extract to ensure that the balance left on the account at due date is not collected from customers bank accounts when they have specific types of NBB plans in force, this allows us to configure both Balance-on-due-date and Bill-smoothing type structures within the NBB subsystem. As can be seen from this table, there is no single plan type which will cater for all permutations of a clients payment offerings, and as a result most implementations make use of a combination of these components to deliver the required functionality. (edit: minor update to reflect the fact that Payment Plan entries are not deleted once they are proceesed, where-as NBB entries are).

Changing the System Date in CC&B (to cater for testing requirements where the system has to be artificially rolled backwards/forwards) used to be done via the Database initialisation parameters, and the Batch Run Date parameter. But it appears that FEATURE CONFIGURATION now supports this requirement. Simply create a "General System Configuration" Feature Configuration instance (we tend to call ours CMTIMETRAVEL, but there is no restriction on this in the system), and define Option "System Override Date" with the required value. Once again, be aware that it is not recommended that you roll your dates back and forward, since this makes investigation of defects a bit more complicated, but it definitely has its place in relation to test execution (especially Collection and Severance testing, where the process runs across a large number of days and test cycles are typically defined for a much smaller period).

A quick update to include "Gaffen Central" in my links zone. Allan's Blog tends to focus on Technical Architect aspects of Oracle UGBU FW/CC&B installs & upgrades and his page is well worth a visit. I have also included a couple of RSS registration links for readers who would like to subscribe to my blog via RSS, and changed the Top Tags zone to make it a bit easier to read. Enjoy.

We have identified an issue with the use of bundling and UI Maps, whereby the resulting Bundle was wrapping the UI Map in a set of CDATA tags, but only after it had already removed all formatting from the source records, resulting in corruption of the UI Map HTML fragments. This has now been corrected by implementing Single Fix 8228025 on FW/CC&B 2.2.0. If you are using the Bundling subsystem in your implementation, I strongly recommend that you implement this patch.

The Bundle entity was introduced in CC&B 2.2.0 as a single fix (Patch 7009383 and part of Service Pack 2), and can prove useful in relation to the management of the more complex "Cool Tool" reference data components. This entity supports simple Version Control structures by taking a snapshot of the data elements at a point in time, and wrapping this as an XML component for implementation in a target environment. 1. A quick overview of the concepts... 1.1. Base functionality in bundling supports some of the more complex data structures..ie Data Area, Script, Business Service, etc. 1.2. We can extend this functionality by: 1.2.1 generating a custom BO for the Maintenance Object and associate this with a complete schema (by clicking on the generate Schema button on the dashboard) 1.2.2 navigating to the Maintenance Object associated with the underlying records we are trying to migrate, and define the following MO Options.. 1.2.2.1 Eligible for Bundling = '

The Oracle Utilities Software Configuration Management guidelines have a number of recommendations which should be adhered to.. not least of which is the implementation of a structured method of deploying config/reference data in a manner which allows the on-site team to guarantee the environment content (code and data) for each release, before users start using it. In the past I have always followed these guidelines in regards to migration of code, and associated technical reference data (batch controls, Algorithm Types, Lookups, etc), but I have been less diligent in tracking all Config through the recommended migration paths, and tended to adopt a Hub-and-Spoke approach to pushing reference data out from the Master copy environment. Unfortunately this means that the management of this data then becomes a bit of a nightmare for the Config Team, and although the Bundling subsystem developed as part of 2.2 goes some way to providing version control functionality for some referenc

The Synchronise Account functionality has been available in CC&B for quite a while now, and whilst we tend to shy away from using it, it has its place in environment management. With the recent performance fixes implemented on FW2.2, in regards to the CLBDSYNC module, this functionality now allows us to transfer subsets of records between environments in a quick and timely manner. Whilst it is not designed to be used for large sets of data, it does allow us to pull records from our PROD copy instance back into the Pre-Prod environments to provide a basis for problem investigation. Definitely something for you to investigate/consider as part of your on-going environment management effort.

I have updated the link to Anthony's blog to reflect the fact that this has now moved from blogspot.com to back within Oracle.com

I am aware of a number of performance issues with converting a large amount of transactional data, specifically around the Key Generation routines and the method whereby these jobs cannot be multi-threaded (resulting in massive rollback segments as a single SQL statement attempts to process all transactions in one hit). As a result, I have looked into the ability to tune this conversion phase and recommend the following: 1. Review the code in CIPVBSGK (via AppViewer for an example of how CC&B conversion generates keys). 2. Consider dropping all indexes on the CK_* tables before running KeyGen to reduce the amount of I/O (ensure that these are all rebuilt as soon as KeyGen has completed to ensure that other dependent tables do not suffer slowdown as a result of full table scans). 3. Ensure that Rollback Segments, Transaction tables (i.e. Bills, FTs, Payments, Meter Read, etc), Master Data Table (ie Account, SA, etc) and Indexes are allocated their own table-spaces and I/O Chann