artrange data - ofa services

OFA services

experience

We have several years experience of OFA at major clients, running databases of several tens of GBs in size. We understand the fundamental issues behind a sound OFA system - a simple system design aligned with user requirements, good sparsity design and an strong administrative framework.

We have designed, implemented and administered both GL reporting systems and standalone budget systems for some of Europes largest companies.

As with all of our work, we havea 'less is more' mentality, ensuring we bespoke as little as necessary to deliver the required functionality. This reduces your total cost of ownership by driving down maintenance and upgrade costs.

Implementation

For GL reporting systems we can offer rapid (read cheap) implementations, ranging from pilot systems to multiple complex installations. We are happy to work on all aspects of delivery from user requirement analysis and workshops, logical and physical design, hardware sizing, right through to system and interface build.

We have particular knowledge of GL budgeting systems including the provision of automated budget writeback facilites.

Whilst less common, OFA is perfectly capable of functioning as a free standing reporting and modelling system and we have delivered solutions integrating data from a number of sources from mainframes to Excel spreadsheets.

tuning

Solves not running as quick as they used to? Running out of disk storage? Unable to complete a backup of the database let alone regular rebuilds?

Performance can be hard to get right in OFA, the size of your database depends more on the nature of your hierarchies and the sparsity of data than the seed data sizes. Significant changes can occur with a few years or even periods of data building up. Sparsity management (mainly down to composite design) makes a huge difference difference, we have seen databases reduced from 100GBs or more to just a few GBs with performance increasing in line.

In addition to correcting the physical database, it may be that logical changes are required, or can be delivered once the physical design is corrected, and these can again deliver big performance gains. Combining smaller cubes reduces batch times and importantly reduces adminstrative complexity.

Specific problems with interfacing OFA to the GL can be addressed too. Long load times can be reduced by pre-processing balance files to remove redundant records, loading in to a simple interface area and managing separate aggregation areas or even replacing the GL file load with a direct extract can yield huge performance gains.

There is a limited amount of Express environment tuning which can be undertaken but the effects are relatively small.

If all else fails to deliver the required gains we can assist with tuning the hardware platform.

We can provide fixed price performance assessments and quotations if required.

administration

The batch administration facilities in OFA are fairly rudimentary. We can assist with providing a framework for batch scheduling, controlled from unix cron, the Oracle Concurrent Manager, third party tools or a mixture of methods.

Regular monitoring and housekeeping are essential to keep your OFA system in good order. We can provide administration scripts and procedures to help you avoid most serious administrative headaches.

disaster protection

Are your backups in order? Can you recover from a disasterous hardware failure or other crisis?

We can help you plan, implement and test a disaster recovery strategy.

upgrade

We can help with upgrades of OFA versions, hardware platforms or system functionality.

artrange data ltd