Defining a reporting strategy
Archived
2 Tasks
5 mins
Advanced
Pega Platform 8.3.1
English
Scenario
Front Stage has been experiencing issues tracking the equipment used to prepare for outdoor events. Equipment that is not recovered such as umbrellas and seat covers affects the profit FSG makes on each event. Over the past 18 months FSG has instituted bar codes on its equipment. When an event attendee is given an umbrella, for example, that umbrella’s bar code is scanned as well as the bar code on the attendee’s wrist band.
Front Stage has been renting equipment for outdoor events from third parties. By using the equipment bar-coding system's historical data, FSG is considering whether it could achieve greater profit if were to purchase and house its own equipment.
After every event hosted by FSG, the bar-coding system’s data has been captured. FSG now wants that data imported to their system to facilitate business intelligence. FSG does not want this analysis to affect its Booking application’s web tier users.
FSG does have an existing Data Warehouse where reports can be created. That Data Warehouse lacks the ability to be receive data from the bar-coding system. Fortunately, FSG has been able to devise a way to accept the data using Pega.
Provide a recommendation how best to handle the imported information to allow FSG business personal access to reports with minimal impact to the Booking application’s web tier users. Identify viable approaches to meet the requirement and provide a recommended approach.
Detailed Tasks
1 Solution detail
Data types can be defined in Pega that correspond to the information collected by the bar-coding system. Instances of those data types can be persisted in an external database as opposed to the PegaDATA schema include in the Pega database repository.
If reporting was performed using the PegaDATA schema, numerous rows from that schema would need to be accessed to aggregate the data. Even if the database was tuned for quick retrieval of the data, putting large amounts of data on the clipboard could impact JVM performance, thereby affecting web tier user who share the same PegaRULES database.
The best option is to leverage BIX to publish data from the external database to theFSG data warehouse. The BIX extract process would run on a dedicated type=BIX node to ensure no adverse impact to type=WebTier nodes. The diagram below shows how the data is moved from the external database to the Front Stage data warehouse.
A link to reports created in that Data Warehouse can be added to the Dashboards viewed by FSG executives.
2 Solution alternatives
You could load the data into Pega and create reports. But, you know that retrieving several thousand rows and aggregating the results over time could have a heavy performance cost.