PPDM Houston User Meet

Baker Hughes, Infosys, Noah Consulting, P2ES, Petrosys’ projects—and a hint at PPDM 4.0.

Around 80 turned-out for the PPDM Association’s first two-day Houston User Group meet last month chez Hess. Baker Hughes (BHI) teamed with Infosys to provide a blow by blow account of BHI’s PPDM-Based Well Header Master. PPDM 2.8 and work done in the What is a Well project laid down a philosophical backbone, with an ESRI SDE/Oracle stack running on a Veritas/Solaris fail-over cluster. ETL services were provided by Oracle Warehouse Builder—although this power tool required considerable effort to use in the complex E&P data context. Other tweaks were required to make PPDM performant in a production environment.

Noah Consulting and partner P2 Energy Solutions offered insights into the various elevations, heights and datums present in data models, software and the real world. A seemingly straightforward issue that is in reality full of pitfalls as these attributes are shared across industry databases including Ocean, Epos, R5000, OpenSpirit and PPDM. The importance of getting datum right is of some importance when drilling a horizontal well into a thin sand!

Petrosys described several PPDM migration projects undertaken for clients in Australia and North America (the company also leverages PPDM in its own dbMap product). Petrosys has assisted Santos with its PPDM-derived in-house database and the Cooper Basin partners (Santos, Origin and Beach) use dbMap/PPDM to share joint venture data. dbMap’s seismic data management capability has been leveraged by Apache, PGS and Chevron and Petrosys recently converted BP Houston’s Finder seismic database to PPDM 3.8, leveraging Petrosys’ flavor of Oracle spatial indexing. Other flagship Petrosys projects include bespoke developments for Marathon, Origin Energy, Santos and Saudi Aramco. The latter involved the development of a pressure mapping extension to Aramco’s in-house developed production database.

PPDM CEO Trudy Curtis outlined the planned changes for the upcoming 3.9 release—scheduled for later this year. Curtis noted that some planned changes to the model were deferred during the 3.8 release and are still pending a decision from the modeling team. These changes, to primary key structures, and to mandatory columns, will be ‘highly destructive’ to existing models and will have a high impact on implementers. Options are—biting the bullet and making the changes, deferring them again (till 4.0?), or abandoning the change altogether. Comments to links/1004_1. Presentations from the User Group available on ppdm.org.

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