The Chronicler's Web (TCW)

By DAN CALLOWAY
Published 8 February @ 04:04 UTC

WEAVERVILLE, NC – As a consultant for Data Consulting, Inc., I was  asked to prepare an analysis and a recommendation for a client who transacts sales strictly in a click-and-mortar business environment to its online customer base. The client is ABC.com who sells books, recorded music, and musical equipment to online customers via its website does not transact business in a traditional brick-and-mortar establishment, but has buildings to house its employees, inventory, and other warehousing needs. Sales generated by ABC.com through OLTP are conducted 24/7. Online transaction processing has escalated rapidly over the last year with ABC.com seeing sales grossing in excess of $2M in the 4^th Qtr of FY09 alone. With the rapid increase in sales online, the company is concerned with its ability to maintain and access customer transaction history, customer sales order information, and customer shipping and billing information in a timely manner to properly conduct business with its customers, while providing secure online transaction query capabilities for its customers who buy products and track order shipments online and the company’s employees, its suppliers and business partners who need to query data for their own purposes.

ABC.com utilizes several eCommerce applications and a separate customer database application through the process of conducting business with its customers, suppliers, and business partners. All OLTP data is currently stored in separate application RDBMS databases and relevant customer data is housed in its own database where it is primarily accessed via SQL queries issued online by the various entities where data is retrieved on-the-fly and the results compiled as needed. Even though the SQL queries are typically fast and reliable, having to pull data from various application RDBMS databases and the customer data from its own RDBMS database application is beginning to present problems both in reliability and overall performance, especially when it comes to querying this data and having it delivered to the requester online.

During my analysis of ABC.com’s business processes and OLTP, it was evident in the case of ABC.com, that it, like many other similar enterprise businesses, was suffering from the rapid increase in ERP, eCommerce applications, and data warehousing applications, which necessitated an increase in the importance for underlying database management as a key enabling technology solution for this company (van den Hoven, J., 2002).Thus I recommened to the company’s senior management a flexible solution to its database dilemma, one that offered a much needed change from the rigid RDBMS architecture with which the company was currently attempting to maintain. The solution was to combine all of the current eCommerce application and customer-related RDBMS databases into one central data warehouse so that this online retail company could not only increase the reliability and efficiency of its SQL query search capability but, at the same time, could have the capability to record every customer database transaction in a central location that would allow the company to mine other pertinent data, such as customer purchasing patterns, product popularity, geographical preferences, and many other data that should allow the company to increase its sales potential while reducing the cost of doing business online (Seltzer, M., 2005).

In addition, I recommended that a Web Search engine for accessing the data warehouse be implemented as soon as possible since this would facilitate better key word searches using SQL queries in an online environment (Seltzer, M., 2005).

References:

van den Hoven, J. (2002). EBSCOhost: AND THEN THERE WERE THREE. Information Systems Management, 19(2), 88-90.

Seltzer, M. (2005). Beyond Relational Databases. ACM, Q: Focus Databases, 3(3), 50-58.