Foxtel - SMS
“DBAInc have a great ability to communicate the ‘technology speak’ as well as ‘business speak’ to our business partners and IT people. They are very personable, go in and 'get it done', and know how to communicate to various stakeholders really well. They are great to work with and we really value their database expertise.”
FOXTEL is Australia’s leading subscription television provider. It is now available to more than 70% of Australian homes, with more than 1.325 million homes currently connected to the FOXTEL service directly or by receipt of services provided on a wholesale basis to other providers such as Optus TV.
Requirement
DBAInc has been working with Foxtel for almost 10 years, after initially being engaged to provide VMS support, through a contract with Telstra. The database has now grown to over ½ a terabyte with 2,000 users.
Solution/Services
DBAInc have been involved across all lifecycle phases for Foxtel’s SMS database, including the build, testing, development and support for the database system, as well as supporting datawarehouse feeds from Sydney. The DBAInc team has worked on loading data, tuning the database as new users have come onboard, building interfaces into it, and opening the database up for client server connectivity.
Ad hoc and scheduled reporting has also been a key aspect of DBAInc’s involvement, which has meant that Foxtel have not had to engage dedicated report writers, through DBAInc being able to readily access, process and drive extracts and turn tailored reports around for the business quickly.
One of the key projects DBAInc worked on during its time at Foxtel involved restructuring the Oracle SMS repository to support all addresses in Australia. The large (120 gig. database) was the subject of three large data conversion/migration exercises. On each occasion the changes were been successfully implemented without disruption to the business processes. The conversion strategy involved fallback positions at the various project stages, as a contingency in the event of application failure.
Over DBAInc’s time at Foxtel, the team has developed a product called DBAInc streamliner to streamline the datawarehouse incremental feeds due to the huge size of the datawarehousing. The product uses Oracle streams and change data streams. It essentially reads from journals and sees any incremental changes and takes them offline, to reduce pressure on the datawarehouse environment by feeding them into flat files.
DBAInc has also provided strategic guidance to the new data warehouse internal team, and consulted with them as the team has been set up in Sydney. Additionally, Foxtel are bringing their billing system inhouse so DBAInc are providing extract information and validation checks.
Outcomes and business benefits
A DBAInc team is based onsite at Foxtel and works closely to ensure that Foxtel have the most efficient running systems, and ensure that reports are delivered efficiently and timely to the business.
Technology
Oracle, SQLServer |
