Page 150 - DCAP603_DATAWARE_HOUSING_AND_DATAMINING

Data Warehousing and Data Mining

notes 4. Frequency of data transfer and outage periods
5. System connectivity details such as FTP drop zones

6. The file structures that were being processed, if applicable
The technical specifications covered the following topics:
1. Detailed technical design and architecture of the project
2. All database-related details including the various servers, IP details, and the like
3. Detailed configuration details of the various Seebeyond integration components,
including connectors
4. Detailed description of the error flow, including the codes
5. Detailed description of the logging mechanism
6. Input and output data structures and the transformations involved, if any

7. Pseudo-code

Common Data Format (CDF)

The various systems at Royal Wallace company that were to be incorporated into the
integration model were based on different platforms. And, the applications that were
running on these systems used to exchange data in various different formats with the
outside world. Most of these were proprietary formats that each of these applications
had created as per their own requirements over the years; there was no single standard
approach that had been followed. Some of them had fixed-length records, others were
delimited; some followed ASCII character encoding, others were EBCDIC; and so on. And
above all, as most of these formats were in existence over the past several years, the system
owners were very reluctant to replace them for a common standard format/template.

So one of the major challenges was to come up with a solution that could somehow transform
and translate these multiple data formats passing through the integration model, thereby
enabling the various systems to communicate with the SAP-based PO system. Moreover,
the solution had to be scalable enough to incorporate any new data formats in the future
with minimal changes to the existing scenario.

The solution was to make use of the Common Data Format (CDF), as shown in Figure 4.
figure 4: common Data format

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