Do you have issues while approving promotions by using Oracle Retail Price Management module, or with conflict checking, deals, invoice matching, deals to name just a few of processes?
Have you ever heard for Location Move, Future Cost Engine Batch or New Item Location batch?
If the answer is yes, then you’ll find a lot of articles about it on this site.
What are the most common issues with Oracle Retail Suite?
There are two main areas of issues with Oracle Retail system: batch programs from one side, and modules (like Price Management) that are doing heavily data processing while executing complex business calculations on the other side.
As Oracle Retail have to process large quantities of data, such processing is executed by using many batch programs, written in Pro*C and Java mainly.
Basically, Oracle Retail has two systems in one suite. First one is classical OLTP system, while the other one is batch system, which is similar to ETL process that imports fresh data into the Data Warehouse.
To handle such type of processing, Oracle Retail is using many temporary, nested and object tables.
Main issues with such SW architecture and design comes from the fact that each customer has significantly different volume and type of the data (like number of stores, items…).
As Oracle database has some hard coded rules how to calculate temporary/nested/object tables, what is working fine for one customer, for the other one works too slowly.
In addition, even a tiny change in execution plan is sufficient to delay finishing of some business process, when the data volume is large.
Oracle Support notes are far from sufficient to help customers to stabilize the Oracle Retail system, with limited influence on performance improvement.
How this site can help you?
By finding articles about SW architecture, Database Design, the code itself, and all components of the infrastructure stack (from the storage, OS, Database, WebLogic, OSB, BI Publisher etc.), you can expect many times faster system (sometimes even up to 1000x)
That not only result in huge licenses cost savings, but also speed up all critical business processes.
For large implementations, you may need to implement many optimizations to get faster system.
You will also find many articles about how to record all issues found on the target Oracle Retail System, with suggestions how to resolve it.
By following articles of how to identify issues, you’ll be able to found advices applicable at your own environments, dealing with whole enterprise stack covering storage, OS, Middle tier, Database layer, Java/JVM, and Oracle Retail System with suggestions how to resolve it.
Armed with a knowledge of 25+ years of work with Oracle products, 20+ years specialization in Oracle performance tuning and many thousand problems solved on the largest projects, you can be sure that I’ll try to maintain high quality of articles in the blog section.
Comments