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MDM - If You're Willing to Pay the Price
February 25, 2020

MDM - If You're Willing to Pay the Price

Chris Oros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM)

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.

  • Integration-wise, MDM syncs with the OU product CCB without issue.
  • The documentation behind the functional use of MDM is well maintained. This helps functional analysts when business issues arise and DBAs for technical issues.
  • Integration-wise, MDM is flawless with CCB, but the amount of time it takes to load and interpret daily reads is nearly prohibitive. Through a process called "meter interrogation," Oracle is supposed to process initial reads into final measurements. This is supposed to run three times a day, but because the process is so resource-intensive, we are only able to run it barely twice a day. Production resources lag during this time and user experience is reduced.
  • The amount of data the MDM require to be kept in just two of the thousands of database tables indicates a very poor design, or at least a poor integration of the Lodestar product that they purchased and turned into MDM. The initial measurements and final measurements tables take up around 85 to 90 percent of the database. This bloatedness in database size translates into slower performance for the front-end user as well as real costs in terms of data storage. Any user using Oracle's Exadata software will pay dearly for not having a purge and archive strategy.
  • Our former mainframe system would not have been able to handle the new requirement we have in Pennsylvania for 15-minute interval reads. MDM being able to handle this with base functionality saved us the cost of developing a custom solution for this.
  • MDM's hardware requirements are quite expensive, especially if you want the best performance technically and for the front-end user, as you must purchase Oracle's Exadata hardware. This capital expenditure has been heavy for our utility and supported by increased tariff measures.
Although I have minimal experience with meter data management products outside of MDM, it does perform better than an in-house product developed by our utility 20 years ago for use on our mainframe-based system then. Meter management is headed the same way as other industries in terms of data usage and mining. The requirement for data is only going to continue to increase, and at this time it appears that MDM is only just keeping up with those requirements. Oracle has done a great job of purchasing products and integrating them into their overall framework, but the current database structure of MDM lends itself to poor performance if Oracle's own hardware is not purchased, and if their purge and archive strategy (i.e. ILM) is not employed.

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.

Do you think Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM)'s feature set?

No

Did Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (MDM) again?

No

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.