MDM - If You're Willing to Pay the Price
Oracle Utilities' Meter Data Management module is used by our metering services department, with tangential use by multiple other …
Oracle supplies a suite of utilities management applications, including the Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) application.
Oracle Utilities' Meter Data Management module is used by our metering services department, with tangential use by multiple other …
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Oracle Utilities' Meter Data Management module is used by our metering services department, with tangential use by multiple other departments throughout our utility company. As an electric-only utility, MDM is used only to measure and manage electrical meter data.
From the meter setup, to the initial measurement, to the algorithms and logic that determines a final measurement, MDM process this entire data flow. The main use of the finalized meter data is for billing customers in an integrated cross-application connection with our customer-centric system (which is Oracle's Customer Care and Billing module). Beyond this, meter usage statistics are used for revenue forecasting and daily and monthly load expectations for our public utility commission.
One of the primary reasons OU's MDM product was chosen was that we were moving off a mainframe system and wanted our customer-based and meter-based applications to be serviced by the same software, reducing any sort of integration errors or headaches. Though integration has not been an issue, MDM itself is not the most intuitive tool, and is likely the lesser of the two products.
Oracle Utilities MDM is well suited for users that have plenty of money to invest in technical hardware resources to support the requirements of this application. With the electric utility industry becoming more and more precise data-wise, the requirements for data storage and processing are only going to increase. For example, electrical usage measurement used to be a once-a-month practice; in the 1990s, hourly reading was introduced; recently, 15-minute interval readings have been introduced and will become the new norm. Going from one reading a month, to 720, to now 2,880 requires expensive hardware. MDM is able to handle this load, in our experience, only if you purchase Oracle's Exadata hardware, which is priced at a premium. Beyond data storage itself, we have also found that MDM real-time usage for users is also, unfortunately, best with Exadata. Likely because Oracle developed this hardware, and because it has built-in compression, portioning, and tuning features, performance is better.
One note is that Oracle does provide a purge-and-archive strategy in the more recent versions of MDM (i.e. ILM). However, implementation of this is a small project in itself, although worthwhile in the long run.
Dealing with Oracle's help personnel in the "My Oracle Support" forum they have set up is at worst frustrating and at best time-consumingly adequate. Support personnel seem to be trained in immediately passing the onus for resolution back to the customer. For example, no matter what an issue is, a request for database logs will immediately be requested, whether or not they are relevant. Learning what to anticipate can help when logging an SR (service request), but the process and the SLA to resolve always seem to be painstakingly slow.
In addition to support being mediocre, Implementation and DBA documentation is sometimes rife with typos and errors, not lending a reassuring level of confidence to the product itself.
One positive is that My Oracle Support does post articles on past issues and their resolution, and I believe Oracle does try to incorporate the resolutions or bug fixes into future releases.