Oracle Parallel Processing

Case Study 3: A DSS Application on an MPP Platform

Framework Superstore is a large, nationwide department store dealing with items such as clothing, shoes, household goods, appliances, cosmetics, jewelry, and electronics. The company has a chain of stores spread throughout the country. The chain is organized into four regions: East, West, North, and South. The headquarters for these four regions are located in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas, respectively.

An OLTP system holds the daily transactional data from all the stores. This transactional data then is loaded into a data warehouse for use in generating business intelligence for decision support. Store management uses the data warehouse to make decisions on pricing policies, discount policies, product promotions, inventory management, and so forth. This helps management to develop marketing programs targeted at various customer groups so as to enhance customer loyalty and produce tangible results that improve profitability.

The business managers run complex queries on the data warehouse to extract useful business intelligence such as price elasticity and product affinities by analyzing the raw transactional data. For example, a sales manager would be interested to know the impact of certain changes—for example, a 10 percent price increase on a certain brand of leather jacket and a 10 percent price reduction on another brand of overcoat—on the total sales volume and profitability of these two items. Another sales ...