Saturday, December 28, 2013

DOLFIN (Directory of Lubes and Fuels Information)

In Resume
Project
DOLFIN (Directory of Lubes and Fuels Information)
Customer
BP International
Period
Oct-2009 to Nov-2009
Description
BP International maintains the DOLFIN system in the field of Marine Business. It covers both the Fuels and Lubricants. It is a global business intelligence system providing MI to all levels of the marine business. This is a complete data warehouse which provides detailed drill-down data in sales, credit, marketing and supply chain management. It extracts and load data from 8 heterogeneous applications. From Oil exploration to refined oil transportation is tracked via this system.
Role
Transit team member
Solution Environment
Oracle 8.1 Database, Solaris 10.0 (Unix Environment), Windows 2003 server
Tools
Toad(For PL/SQL)
Highlights
This was a Mahindra Satyam owned project. TCS grabbed the project. In time of transition I involved in following activity:-

  1.  Taken Knowledge transition from Satyam (Functional & Technical) and passed to TCS developers.
  2. Framing Knowledge sharing template
  3. Proposed loopholes of the project to BP and the details of the solution to be made.
  4. Conducted presentation of understanding to BP.
  5. Conducted internal knowledge transition to TCS employee to whom we handed over the project.
  6. In support phase controlled many PL/SQL and UNIX scripts.
  7. Load data via SQL Loader, DBLINK and External table.
  8. Scheduling jobs via crontab.


BP International was planning to change vendor for some projects and TCS got a major portion of it. As I was looking for a change and Business Objects upgrade project is about to come, my managers proposed me to get a project transition from Satyam InfoTech and deliver to internal project team of TCS.
               
  I was working on some PL/SQL script changes which my managers took as my skillset and I was assigned to transition project called DOLFIN (Directory of Lubes and Fuels Information) in Hyderabad, India.

                I and another senior guy was the team. PL/SQL was the second expertise we both had at that time. But our role was more functional then technical (but it became opposite). As briefed by our project migration managers we need to understand the basics of the project, extract as much information as possible from Satyam associates and deliver to the technical team which was yet to be built.

                Our major challenges were to extract the information as the losing party never reveals all secrets.  All other projects suffered a lot due to this attitude. But my senior was the most powerful communicator I have ever seen. By his fabulous interpersonal skill and my inquisitive questionnaire we were able to get most of the information including the codes and “Notes on the codes”.

                During transition, client wants to test our understanding and we supported the project for few weeks without help of Satyam’s team. For that we did many code analyses and did rigorous documentation. That was the first time when I documented a big project which enhanced my documentation skill.

                DOLFIN was a centralized warehouse which is used by 10 different applications. The warehouse was completely controlled by raw PL/SQL script without using any tools. There was inbound and outbound data from different type of heterogeneous system. I was amazed to see the data coming from the application which was tracking the ship carrying crude oil from Mid-Atlantic. Design was so complex and some codes we couldn’t decode.

                I did several presentation in-front-of client and higher management to show our progress and quality of information which we extracted. We wrote an Application Understanding document which is not only a source of functional but also a good reference book for technical understanding.

                Few of the things which I learnt in this project were loading data through DBLINK and External tables. As the infrastructure was with Satyam and BP International need to move the application to in-house servers, we worked with BP infrastructure team to load the whole warehouse to BP server.

                After transferring knowledge to database team I returned back to my old project where another small project was waiting for me.




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