In a recent posting, Wes Baird describes the state of play on Geologic Systems’ ‘PPDM in a Box’ (PiaB—Oil ITJ December 2009). PiaB is a pre-populated PPDM 3.8 implementation including master, asset lifecycle and business process management. PiaB targets start ups, ‘green field’ developments, agencies and national oil companies. Turning the bare bones of the PPDM data model into an industrial strength product that includes Sarbanes-Oxley compliant data audit across 1,700 tables requires a considerable amount of extra work. The latest ‘preliminary build’ release of PiaB (V1.2) relies on database triggers to ensure coherency as a single update may touch multiple columns in multiple tables. Triggers ‘mindlessly and consistently perform these simple tasks over and over again.’ Triggers ‘can be a maintenance nightmare, they need a carefully planned architecture’ to work.
Baird has created database triggers for both Oracle and SQL Server flavors of PiaB which have been running trouble free for a couple of months. The next task is to test ‘at scale’ on GeoLogic’s full size data set of ‘a couple of billion production rows.’ Baird concludes, ‘Database triggers save time and money and add consistency. They just need some care and feeding and architecting to make them add business value.’ More from www.oilit.com/links/1109_18.
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