Oracle Expert

A few years ago, I worked in the past with a niche product called OST Business Rules, which empowers finance business users to develop their own accounting engine rules in a nice user friendly manner, therefore reducing the need for heavy development works from Finance IT.

OST was subsequently bought by Microgen, and where OST Business Rules have now evolved to a product called Microgen Aptitude. The concept is still fairly similar. You take various feeds from your upstream systems, either in the form of flat files, or xml messages. Aptitude via standard loader or MQ, will load the data into the database, and enrich them, prior to applying all the required business rules, to feed into various target, such as the general ledger, financial repository (data warehouse), for reporting purposes.

While Microgen Aptitude feels like a godsend to accountants, which allows them to create and implemented accounting business rules relatively quickly, like any other automatic wizzardy type applications, it can be misused, and create a maintenance nightmare.

Microgen Aptitude requires a database server and an application server.

The key point here is that data is processed row by row.

In order to achieve high throughput, the applications relies on sufficient bandwith between the database server and the application server, as well as relies heavily on concurrent process to be able to increase its throughput. So lets say you have 60k accounting events to process, and you have 1 hour to process it, that means will need to process 1000 events per minute. Depending on complexity of required enrichment, plus the complexity of the accounting rules, this could prove to be a lot of events to process within a minute. In this case you will perhaps be running 10 streams in parallel.

So yes, network traffic will be quite busy. You will be getting hot blocks on your tables, as multiple processes are likely to want to write to the same block at the same time.

To be continued …