Core Banking & Oracle Products

In this post, I will try to give all the Oracle infrastructure components and products that can be positioned for fulfilling the needs in a Core Banking environment.

In a banking environment, the core banking applications (as a software suite) provide all the core banking features including all the banking products, services (loans, trade finance, treasury, payments etc..) and reporting(for basic operations and regulatory requirements)

In this kind of an application environment, which needs high performance and reliability in all the tiers;  the quick look already tells us the core infra can be addressed with Weblogic and Oracle Database.

The application can leverage Weblogic JVMs (Managed Servers) with all the sophisticated functionalities that come with them. This includes, clustering, scale out mechanism and even the auto-scale mechanism (considering the Cloud Platforms)

The database layer should be Oracle. The application can take advantages of the key abilities of Oracle Database and its products/options (Real Application Clusters/RAC, Partitioning, Diagnostics Pack, Tuning Pack, and Database Lifecycle Management) to provide an efficient and high-performance scale-out platform, that is also completely fault tolerant, traceable, fully monitored, and diagnosable. (at all levels)

The Oracle technologies and their areas of use in the context of a Core Banking Software Suite are as follows. 

Database Enterprise Edition: Applications can leverage core Enterprise Edition functionalities and database options of Oracle Database to minimize the downtime and deliver superior performance in the database layer.

Partitioning: In the database layer, partitioning can be used for increasing query performance and easing the data management operations.

Diagnostic Pack: Oracle Database Diagnostic pack can used for having automatic performance diagnostics and monitoring functionalities in the database layer. ADDM and AWR can be used for shedding lights on the complicated performance issues in complex Core Banking database environments. In conjunction with the use of Enterprise Manager; these functionalities delivered with the diagnostic pack can help addressing database performance issues and will let the database administrators discover the causal sequences to many potential causes and effects.

Tuning Pack: Oracle Database Tuning pack can used for ensuring high database query performance. Using real time SQL monitoring feature, SQL Access Advisor and SQL Tuning advisor; SQL layer can be tuned continuously as it will require less effort.. Having a optimized SQL execution makes administrators ensure they have smooth running of their core banking applications.

Real Application Clusters: Having active-active database clusters is vital for ensuring continuity in the database and being aligned with the tight SLAs of Core Banking applications. Real Application Clusters a.k.a RAC option of Oracle Database provides multi-node active-active database clusters. By using RAC option, fault tolerance(along with load balancing) is ensured. RAC is a crucial component for a having maximum availability architecture in the database layer of the Core Banking Applications.

Advanced Compression: Advanced database compression capabilities of Oracle Database can be used for improving database performance and reducing storage cost in the database layer of Symphony. Especially fast-growing database environments can leverage these advanced compression capabilities delivered with this option, to speed up their large database I/Os and minimizing their database footprint.

Database Lifecycle Management: Oracle Database Lifecycle Management pack helps Core Banking Database Administrators to provision and patch multiple Oracle Database easily. Administrators of Core Banking environments with several databases (including PROD, Reporting, TEST, UAT, DEV etc.) can take the advantage of having a managed database lifecycle to eliminate the time-consuming tasks related to patching, configuration management and ongoing change management of Oracle Database environments.

Advanced Security: Core Banking environments are highly regulated environments and most of these regulations are related with the data protection. Using advanced security features (like Transparent Data Encryption and Data Redaction) of Oracle Database, out-of-band access to Core Banking data and proliferation of the sensitive data can be prevented directly.

Database Vault: There are lots of user profiles and personas using Core Banking applications and databases. (Analysts, administrators, developers, operators and so on) Using Oracle Database Vault can be used for implementing separation of duties in the core banking database layer.. It provides a unique way for restrict access to application data by privileged users.

Weblogic Server Enterprise Edition: Core Banking environment can utilize Weblogic Server Enterprise Edition in its middleware. Weblogic server is positioned as the application server, that supports fully clustered java virtual machines on it unified and extensible platform. Weblogic supports developing, deploying, and running enterprise applications, such as Java, for on-premises and cloud.

As mentioned in the intro; Core Banking applications can leverage Weblogic JVMs(Managed Servers) with all the sophisticated functionalities that come with it. This includes, clustering, scale out mechanism and even the auto-scale mechanism (considering the Cloud Platforms)

Data Integrator Enterprise Edition: Oracle Database Integrator a.k.a ODI can be used as the ETL (Extract, Transform Load) tool for providing the data integration processes around (and in) the core banking database environments. Using ODI and its sophisticated graphical interface, all those complex processes can be built easily. Monitoring of the ETL tasks can be done at all levels, change management in ETL process can be done faster and ETL itself can be done faster by leveraging the power of the target databases. ODI provides several connectors for integrating different database and Big Data environments. If needed, it can also expose its services via APIs.

Analytics Publisher: Oracle Analytics Publisher is the reporting tool that can be used within Core Banking Applications. All the reporting activities can be done using this tool. It provides both Desktop and Web interfaces. Oracle Analytics Publisher can used for generating all kinds of reports against almost any data source.

Real Application Testing: Oracle Real Application Testing a.k.a RAT is used for ensuring database performance in the cases of a new (and big) database code deployment, data migrations, database migrations, structural change in the database, database replatforming, database upgrades (and so on.) in  Core Banking environments. It is an Oracle Database product that helps the organizations foresee the effects of those kinds of changes.. To be able to see the performance effect of such a change, all the database workload is captured from the source and then replayed in the target using RAT.. Using the sophisticated reports of the tool, all the necessary analysis can be made, and the necessary improvements can be done before the production iteration.

Golden Gate: Oracle Golden Gate a replication tool, that can replicate, filter, and transform data between databases.. It operates near real time by leveraging its unique CDC features and it is clearly the best way to replicate data between Oracle databases. Golden Gate is used in various scenarios around(and in) Core Banking environments. These scenarios include cross platform data migrations, bi-directional data replications, zero downtime database migrations, zero downtime database upgrades and so on.

Golden Gate can also be positioned in the ETL processes in the relevant contexts when real time data from the source is needed and when there are various data resources to be visited.