Harris Scarfe - Data Warehouse Support and DBA Services

The Client

Harris Scarfe is a classic department store style retailer selling merchandise as varied as electrical, manchester, homewares, sporting goods, men's and women's fashions, surfwear, children's wear, toys, shoes, handbags, accessories and cosmetics. Harris Scarfe has grown from one store in Adelaide in 1992 to a current total of 23 across South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.

The Challenges

To provide programming and DBA support services for the Harris Scarfe data warehouse. To add new metrics to the data warehouse.

The Solution

SRA was engaged to add Gross Profit and Stock metrics to Harris Scarfe's existing data warehouse. This involved responsibility for developing and testing the Extract, Transformation and Load processes to add the new data to the data warehouse. This required developing scripts to extract data from Harris Scarfe's merchandising system, transform it in several stages to summarise and aggregate the data before finally loading it into the data warehouse.

It also involved adding data loads of historic stock and gross profit information to the existing data warehouse. This required SRA to address significant performance management issues as the new data added tens of millions of rows to the data warehouse.

SRA also has an on-call role to provide Database Administrator services for Harris Scarfe. This involves ongoing monitoring and performance tuning of the Oracle 8i database for Harris Scarfe's data warehouse and the Oracle 7.3.4 database for their merchandising system. The role also requires responding to any ad-hoc database issues.

SRA was responsible for tuning the overnight load of the data warehouse from the merchandising system and achieved a performance improvement of over 400%.

We are currently in the process of upgrading the data warehouse to the 9i release of the Oracle database.

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The Technology

Oracle 8i database;
Oracle 9i database;
PL/SQL;
Pro*C;
Microstrategy.

The Services

Requirements Analysis;
Data Warehouse Design;
ETL Processing;
Database Administration.

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