[Serusers] Why Transactional Accounting?

[Michael Shuler]

At first it seemed like a really good idea then the more I looked at real
world records I realized that to generate a bill for a customer would
require quite bit of work on MySQL's part to match up the INVITE's and the
BYE's and then calc the difference in the times.  This causes a bit of a
problem for me because I like my customers to be able to see their CDR
records live.  Which really isn't much unless you look at it from a 100,000
user perspective.  I would either have to beat up my SQL server every time
they look at their records (or my customer service employees look at them or
even when the biller generates their bill) or run a cron job that runs every
so often to convert the data to a single record with a start time and a
duration and store it in another table.  The cron idea isn't too efficient
because of wasting disk space and rewriting a lot of the same data twice.  

This then leads me to ask why the SER acc module wasn't setup to generate an
initial start record identical to the INVITE message that it already does
that would be marked as "in progress"?  Then when a BYE is received with a
matching Call-ID you find the original INVITE record, change its status to
"done" and populate a duration field.  Any ideas why this can't be done
without affecting SER's scalability? :)

Thanks!

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Michael Shuler, C.E.O.
BitWise Systems, Inc.
682 High Point Lane
East Peoria, IL 61611
Office: (217) 585-0357
Cell: (309) 657-6365
Fax: (309) 213-3500
E-Mail: mike at bwsys.net
Customer Service: (877) 976-0711