[Serusers] Why Transactional Accounting?

[Michael Przybylski]

SER seems to support postgresql as an accounting backend, and postgresql
support "triggers."

This is a synthesis of only a cursory look at the SER source tree and
postgresql docs on triggers, but it looks like you can do the following:

1.) Set up SER to use postgresql as it's accounting backend.
2.) Create an extra table with the fields you would like to see in your
"real world records."
3.) Create trigger to corelate INVITES and BYEs and insert a row into your
"real world records" table every time it notices that a BYE has been
inserted into the transactional accounting table.

This is still extra CPU load that will hurt your scalability but it's
fairly elegant and an experienced PostgreSQL user/admin should be able to
crate it up pretty quickly.

Finally, I'd bet that a 2-way or 4-way opteron-based database server would
hold up to a pretty substantial call volume, even while running that
trigger.

Best regards,
Mike Przybylski

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Michael Shuler wrote:

> 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!
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
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