[asterisk-users] CDR Design

[Andrew Thomas]

"I'd disagree. In some cases a event based system would be the best 
solution, but in systems with high call volumes, scanning through events

looking for the proper billing information and parsing them would be a 
hard job compared to CDRs."

That's just it - you wouldn't be 'scanning' any CDR's - you'd be given
Events.  Your 3rd party app could then do anything it wanted to with
them.

Events are real time - not historic (like CDR's).  Events are presented
as they happen (hold, ring, etc) - CDR's are usually presented AFTER the
call has finished so you miss things like hold-times etc.

Remember, I am not saying that everyone should stop using the CDR's if
they feel comfortable with them - but I, for one, don't trust them for
building a stable billing platform or a real time stats package (which
more and more customers seem to want these days).

If you start to change the CDR's to account for extra bits (using a
unique ID) then your 'scanning' actually increases as you will need to
tie up all the unique ID's to get one full call progress path.

Please note, I am not trying to cause flame wars here - just stating
that I'd love an event based stream, that I can parse any way I see fit.
I know there's the AMI - but that is a 2-way, give-you-everything
solution.  All I want is to know when a handset and/or trunk does
something (I don't care about SIP registrations etc).

I guess we'll just have to wait and see what santa murf gives us all for
Christmas :).