BI Cable MSO Case Study

Decentrix consolidates multiple data sources, three terabytes of data, and billions of rows of transactions into a flexible data warehouse that answers the tough questions.

One of the country's largest providers of cable services, and an international communications leader, was inundated with spot data flooding their data warehouse. With more than 20 million cable subscribers, billions of rows of data, multiple terabytes in size, and a very serious problem on their hands: their existing data warehouse design could not support the processing of an OLAP cube in a reasonable amount of time. Executives could not get the information they needed to make critical business decisions.

Decentrix was called in to do what was thought to be a very difficult if not impossible task: augment the existing data warehouse, without a total redesign, and make a nightly OLAP cube rebuild process viable. In a testament to the skill of the consulting team Decentrix was able to install their design improvements side by side with the existing data warehouse, and, by using the best of breed Microsoft tool sets, achieve a level of performance that was an order of magnitude greater that the previously installed solutions. Utilizing techniques from the BIAnalytix™ suite which performs nightly Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) operations in conjunction with incremental (as opposed to full) cube processing, has achieved a nightly maintenance process of around three (3) hours down from an impractical fifteen (15)hours.

• The project implementation is based on the BI technology from Microsoft - SQL Server 2005, Integration Services 2005, Analysis Services 2005, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007.
• The architecture deployed by Decentrix was open, allowing unrestricted in-house development, and the installation included training their internal team to leverage this open design.
• Key functionality imbedded in the BIAnalytix™ Media Base module was able to be deployed for many of the new requirements and provided advanced analysis options beyond the scope of the initial project.
• A number of required custom enhancements were able to be specified and included in the installation project plan.
• The in-house project team worked closely with the Decentrix consulting team throughout the project. The deep media technology knowledge contributed by Decentrix was fundamental to the successful conclusion, as was the techniques and tools drawn from the mature BIAnalytix™ product line.