[Asterisk-Users] CDR_Oracle anybody?

[Tim Jackson]

I'm in no ways a database guru, but take a look at PostgreSQL. It does
most of what MySQL won't, and is still opensource.

-Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Hutton [mailto:pres at nicheware.com] 
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 3:23 PM
To: AsteriskUserMaillist
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] CDR_Oracle anybody?

Hi;

I've been playing around with various report writers on the cdr_mysql
table and I'm getting rather irritated.  I started a thread a couple
weeks ago on "Billing Fun" and got a lot of good responses on how to get
an up-to-date copy of the NDA/NXX database, which I managed to retrieve
and bring into MySQL in a script from the various pieces of code people
posted... very nice.  
After going into this preopinionated from a "php perspective" of MySQL
as a really great tool, by now I'm experiencing the sinking feeling of
being let down- both on the MySQL side and on the various report writer
limitations I've come across.

My goal is to be able to generate a professional looking VOIP Phone
bill, with City & State lookup, Country lookup for International, as
well as a rating table by customer - so I can come up with various
different plans for my clients individually.  I want a billing run to
either calculate this - with appropriate lookups, or I want this to be
done on the database side, populating a secondary cdr table of some
sort- so the report writer run just pulls stuff out of one table and
does nothing more complex than subtotals - simple and easy.

The reasons I'm frustrated are as follows: 
1) MySQl cannot do stored procedures or triggers, or even views.  For
this reason I can't just add a cdr_billing table and pull in City &
State from the NDA/NXX table, et al, on the fly as a call is hung up.
(or various other real-time sorts of ideas that come up along the way) 
MySQL is not a serious database.  Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't
have a clue yet.
2) The best Open Source report writers I've come across are so deeply in
love with Java and low level languages that they don't give the end user
trying to perform calculations anything but the most cryptic tools to
work with.  If I wanted to learn Java I'd just write the whole thing in
pure Java - funk dat.  One can't even directly perform SQL queries
without having an interpreter of some sort in-between.  
3) I'm trying to re-invent the wheel, but, perhaps in a pretty nice way
that might be either marketable or usefull to others as Open Source,
though I can't justify spending a lot of time on it unless it brings
something in for me. 

So since my wife is a senior Oracle (Financials) person, and I've got 9i
running on a couple of machines (experimenting with Compiere CRM/ERP)
I'm really tempted to put her to work.  

Unless somebody already has a really slick solution to this I'd be very
curious (and appreciative) to hear people's thoughts.  BTW: I was
involved in bizarre telephony billing systems back in the early 90's
with International Callback.  I'm not a heads down programmer, but a
math major/cs minor, so the fascination for me is in solving the problem
of creating a sort of "rating engine," but not writing every line of the
code.  I'm located in Argentina, so I have great resources of human
capital to tap into at rates cheaper than India.  Does anybody see a
need/opportunity for something like this?  
  
Thank you very much in advance for your ideas or comments.

Thomas Hutton

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