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MCI WorldCom analyzes huge amounts of call detail records with QueryObject |
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“We have found an optimized software tool which allows us to analyze several tens of millions of daily Call Detail Records over a long timescale in great detail and faster speed than we thought possible.”
- Bradley Rockwell, Manager Circuit & Traffic Systems, MCI/Worldcom |
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MCI Worldcom |
| With more than 20 million customers around the world, MCI WorldCom is leader in business and residential communication services (voice, data and Internet). Its network facilities are throughout more than 125 countries worldwide, employing 58,000
professionals.
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THE CHALLENGE
MCI needed to identify trends in the daily international CDRs (Call Detail Records), which necessitated having at least 180 days of information accessible for reporting. In a six hour processing window, millions of CDRs needed to be gathered, enhanced, appended to previous data, stored and managed – and the resulting query environment made available to nationwide users in a manner allowing for complex queries to be executed in seconds or minutes. Additionally, the chosen solution needed to be highly
scaleable.
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THE SOLUTION
QueryObject System allows MCI WorldCom’s ATLAS (Accumulated Traffic Library and Analysis) system to support hundreds of millions of new Call Detail Records (CDRs) per month. CDR’s are captured daily, then processed and merged with previously captured data – currently more than 14 months worth – and the resulting aggregate QueryObject (QO) information store is hosted on a WEB Server for analysis. The initial QueryObject-based system was specified to handle just 20 days data but it worked so well that the specification has been revised upward, initially to 60 days, and is now running at over 14 months, providing a detailed historic view of network usage trends.
Prior to installing the QueryObject-based system, users had on-line access to only one week’s data and query times could run as much as 20 minutes. Data from previous weeks was only accessible through an overnight query
process.
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THE RESULTS
Besides scalability, the critical benefits that the QueryObject solution provided were: |
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High-speed data
access. Query solutions designed around the QO information stores are orders of magnitude faster than the same solution modeled on an RDBMS platform. MCI challenged its best relational database designers to implement a schema to compete with QO information stores. They tested these solutions against the information stores and found that none of the relational solutions came within hours of the completion time of QueryObject queries. |
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Economy of size. The fractal data representation allows MCI to store weeks of data in 33% of the space that would be required by a normalized relational model (a relational model was built to substantiate this claim).
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| In trying to answer MCI’s challenge, several traditional software systems were tried. All proved unsatisfactory. With the tremendous volume of data, build times were outside the six-hour operational window and query times were measured in hours not minutes. The QueryObject System was able to handle the data loads while maintaining very fast query times. This was all accomplished with a system that runs on ordinary hardware and provides access to the analytical environment through an industry standard interface.
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BOTTOM LINE
QueryObject System provided a scalable and high-information-capacity data mart, which can support rapid concurrent queries and enable applications not technically feasible using traditional technologies.
The combination empowered the company to make better business decisions based on timely, responsive access to all the relevant business information.
Morevover, MCI benefited from an excellent post-sales technical support provided by QO professionals. “In my seventeen years of computing experience, I’ve never seen better customer support and speed of problem resolution” commented Darel Stokes, MCI Circuit & Traffic System
specialist.
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Customer Contact:
Bradley Rockwell
Manager, Circuit & Traffic Systems
MCI WorldCom
972.729.5916
bradley.rockwell@wcom.com
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