Itamar Ankorion, Director of Product Marketing, explains the valuable role CDC plays in delivering data faster to decision makers
Decision makers in an organization need up-to-date information at their fingertips in order to make timely and accurate decisions. At the same time, the volume of data within an organization is growing, while the window of opportunity during which data can be transferred from transactional systems is shortening. Change data capture (CDC) provides an efficient way of overcoming these challenges and delivering real-time data to decision makers.
People lie at the heart of an organization and it’s their decisions, intellectual capital and experience that provide competitive differentiation. Yet to make accurate and timely decisions, business managers and decision makers need access to up-to-date information, reports and analysis.
This information is usually housed within large data warehouses, but is only as up-to-date as the last time data was transferred from the company’s transactional systems. What’s more, with the size of data volumes increasing significantly and the window of opportunity to transfer data shrinking (during non-office hours, for example), IT departments face a battle in delivering information to decision makers in a quick and efficient manner.
Change data capture (CDC) is an approach to data integration that captures, moves and processes only the changes to data sources. It, therefore, eliminates the need for batch windows, manages the growth of data volumes effectively and delivers information to people as and when they need it. Essentially, it’s a more efficient and real-time way to approach data integration, as the amount of data being updated each time only represents a small percentage of the entire data collection.
One of our customers, Abercrombie & Kent, a travel agency offering luxury travel, historically updated data from its reservation system into a data mart as part of a nightly batch process. The next morning, business managers would then extract reports from the data mart. Each night, the update took approximately five hours to complete and the next day the managers were reviewing data that was already a day old. Often this was too late for their needs. Furthermore, the company was spending money supporting and running its systems nightly.
Worse still, if the nightly transfer failed to take place, there was not enough time to run the back-up a second time, so the organization risked losing customers’ reservation information. If this situation were to ever happen, it would have a negative impact not only the company’s reputation, but also its business performance.
By applying our CDC technology, Attunity Stream, Abercrombie now only processes changes and/or updates, eliminating the five hours of nightly batch jobs, freeing up processing resources and delivering the organization's decision makers real-time business intelligence. What’s more, risks are reduced as the company does not have to worry about completing the nightly batch data processing and it has dramatically reduced the resources needed for extract, transform and load (ETL) tools.
"Attunity's real-time CDC solution has allowed us to considerably increase our operational efficiencies. We can now generate timely operational and financial reports immediately without having to wait for our nightly batch processing to complete. The Attunity solution may allow us to eliminate our batch windows altogether."
Scot Anderson, VP of Information Technology
Abercrombie& Kent
While CDC delivers data faster to decision makers, organizations should also examine the IT aspects of CDC solutions. For example, Attunity Stream has been designed to be the least intrusive to the source systems and cause minimal (if any) impact. Furthermore, CDC can be used to extend existing investments in ETL and data integration tools. Attunity Stream integrates seamlessly with such products and has been certified and proven with the leading offerings from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAS.
To summarize, CDC provides companies with a solution for delivering data faster to decision makers, while making data integration more efficient, less risky and reducing costs. CDC can be applied to data warehousing, data replication and application integration projects - Attunity Stream provides a solid solution that can support many such initiatives.
To find out more, contact itamar.ankorion@attunity.com