Oracle8i Beta Customers
Capital One Oracle8i Profile
Capital One Financial Corporation
"Oracle8i's extensive set of data warehousing features should prove valuable to us in
deploying our next generation of data warehouses and marts. We are eager to test
these features during the beta period."
David Gray
Data Warehouse Strategy Architect
Capital One Financial Corporation
Headquartered in Falls Church, Virginia, Capital One Financial Corporation is a
financial services company with more than 10,000 associates whose principal
subsidiaries, Capital One Bank and Capital One, F.S.B., offer consumer lending
products. Capital One's subsidiaries collectively had 14.9 million customers and $16.3
billion in managed loans outstanding as of September 30, 1998, and are among the
largest providers of MasterCard and Visa credit cards in the world. Capital One trades
on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "COF" and is included in the S&P
500 Index.
Current System Requirements
Capital One's Information Based Strategy constantly pushes technology to the limit.
This strategy, which has produced spectacular performance in the competitive Credit
Card / Financial Services business area, relies heavily on Oracle as the data server
engine, numerous instances currently managing multiple terabytes of data for their 14
million card member portfolio. Making such large volumes of data available to
thousands of users with 24 x 7 access requires Capital One IT to be leaders of IT
practices, methodologies, and technologies. Capital One decision-support users are not
traditional users, their level of sophistication and the pace on innovation demands a
data warehouse architecture with the ultimate flexibility and scalability.
Oracle8i Provides Solutions
Capital One has agreed to beta test Oracle8i. Capital One understands the business
benefit of a more powerful database and feel that Oracle8i may assist their IBS
strategy. They intend to test most of the new features (including Java, Data
Warehousing, Security, Management, etc.) and how well they work together to meet the
growing needs of Capital One. Oracle8I will be tested for its ability to scale on the
dimensions of data volume and concurrent users.
Oracle Corporation
1
Oracle8i Beta Plans
One of Capital One's largest data marts is the subject of this Beta Program evaluation,
and will evaluate Oracle Parallel Server, Oracle Partitioning and summary management
warehousing features of Oracle8i. Capital One plans to test Oracle8i in a variety of
ways:
•
Data Warehousing / Summary Management and ROLAP Enhancements - The summary
management capabilities including rewrite, refresh and advisor will drive mart structures by
enabling summary information to be provided / managed as an Oracle8I feature vs. unique
data design / tool capability. Similarly, CUBE and ROLLUP analysis functions will add
flexibility to mart design as available 8.1 features.
•
Data Warehousing / Data Management / New Partitioning Methods / Other Improvements Hash partitioning and composite, and existing 8.0.4 methods will be analyzed for optimum
configuration for various table / business analysis cases. The intent is to specify
recommended mix of partitioning method, indexing scheme and parameters for the various
classes of analysis marts.
•
Oracle Parallel Server - Enhanced Oracle Parallel Server features including self-tuning
parallelism, the DISTINCT query capability and direct node-to-node access via high speed
interconnect will be evaluated in conjunction with current 8.0.4 Oracle Parallel Server
features to assess their performance enhancement and ease-of-use value for enterprise
deployment.
Oracle8i Production Plans
Capital One plans to implement it's first Oracle8i production instance in the first half of
1999. The final timetable for implementation will depend on the beta test success.
Capital One Financial Corporation
Location: Falls Church, Virginia USA
Industry: Financial Services
Database Focus: Data Warehouse
Solution Snapshot
Multiple Data Warehouses/Marts and OLTP systems (online) users: several thousand
(Rapidly growing) customer database: Multiple terabytes distributed over various
Oracle databases; largest single database is currently 500-600 GB.
Key business functions supported include:
• Marketing & Analysis
• Customer Service
• Risk Management
Hardware:
HP UX*; Sun Solaris
*Note only HP UX is being used for the Oracle8i beta test
Key Benefits of Oracle8i
• Speed and Performance gains
• Partitioning enhancements: hash and composite
• ROLAP enhancements: CUBE and ROLLUP
Oracle Corporation
• LDAP - Single sign-on security
• Ease of Use
2