November 2009

New Change Assurance Capabilities: The new 11G Oracle upgrade includes a module called ‘Oracle Real Application Testing’ which tests changes against real-life workloads, with the ability to fine-tune these workloads before putting them into production. Testing time is reduced and testing accuracy is improved, resulting in lower production deployment risk. This allows Compuscan to evaluate system changes with a high degree of confidence and corrective action can be taken before our valued clients are negatively impacted by a system change.

Reduced Storage Needs: The huge growth in the amount of data that needs to be retained online makes storage one of the biggest elements in Compuscan’s IT budget. In addition, application scalability and performance must continue to meet the demands of Compuscan as a business – even as data volumes continue to grow. The new 11G Oracle module called ‘Oracle Advanced Compression’ helps Compuscan to cope with these challenges. ‘Oracle Advanced Compression’ offers a comprehensive set of compression capabilities. Enabling compression for all data types significantly reduces database storage for structured, unstructured, and backup data. Memory efficiency is enhanced as data in memory is in a compressed format. This allows more data to be stored in memory which will improve all Compuscan’s ’systems’ performance.

Stronger Data Security: Compuscan need to address regulatory compliance requirements by protecting sensitive data on the network, on backup media, or within the database from unauthorized disclosure. The new 11G Oracle upgrade module called ‘Oracle Advanced Security’ provides an easy-to-deploy and comprehensive solution for protecting all communication to and from a Compuscan’s database. Another new module called ‘Oracle Database Vault’ controls the ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ of data and applications that can be accessed – protecting Compuscan against the most common security threat: malicious internal users. It achieves this by controlling access to application and database data, even by highly privileged users. Consequently, our clients can rest assured that their data is safe and secure!

Faster Performance: The new Oracle Database 11G upgrade introduces many performance breakthroughs for Compuscan. Oracle streams is up to 2 times faster, and optimizer statistics gathering is both faster and more accurate. Finally, noticeable speedup will be apparent in Compuscan’s applications with the use of new partitioning methods and materialized views.

Greater Availability: Every IT organization is faced with the challenge of improving quality of service while at the same time reducing cost and complexity. One method to achieve consistent high performance is to offload subsidiary work to a replica of the production database. The new 11G Oracle module called ‘Oracle Active Data Guard’ enables Compuscan to use our standby database to improve performance in our production environments as well as provide protection from system failures and site-wide disasters. ‘Oracle Data Guard’ uniquely enables simultaneous read and recovery of a single standby database. A standby database is now available for real-time reporting, backup, testing and online upgrades to production databases. By offloading workloads from production to a standby system, ‘Oracle Data Guard helps enhance the performance of Compuscan’s production systems and provides a more cost-effective disaster recovery solution.

Enhanced Database Management Capabilities: Managing a credit bureau database like Compuscan’s database requires valuable administrative resources. The new 11G Oracle upgrade enables improved administrator productivity by introducing new management automation capabilities.

Isn’t it great! Indeed a mouthful, but we at Compuscan are sure that you will soon experience the above mentioned benefits and reap the rewards. This is just another way we would like to thank you for your valued support and increase the value and service we bring to you!