Saturday, July 13, 2013

Configurator: What is CZGOLD instance?

In Oracle Configurator world, CZGOLD terminology is coined very frequently by Oracle or experienced Configurator implementors and new guys are usually confused by this term.

CZGOLD is an instance strategy which many implementors may already be following in their implemention. CZGOLD is an instance where you import models from one BOM instance, do Configuration model development and publish to multiple different instances.

Not a picture perfect, but something similar to --

         <---------- IMPORT BOM -----<------------BOM INSTANCE
        /                                           ^
       /                                            |
CZGOLD/------->----PUBLISH BOM MODEL(Optional)--->-->
      \
       \
        \----->----PUBLISH BOM MODEL--->--ANOTHER BOM INSTANCE1
         \
          \---->----PUBLISH BOM MODEL-->--ANOTHER BOM INSTANCE2
           \
            \-->----PUBLISH BOM MODEL-->--ANOTHER BOM INSTANCE3


Benefit of having a dedicated CZ instance (CZGOLD) verses maintaining BOM/CZ along with your transactional data (Quote/OM) within a single instance:

Its always good to have a separate dedicated instance for CZ, usually referred as CZGOLD.

Configurator model development is different and standalone process. It does not have any need of transactional environment when BOM is already imported to CZ and until testing of the functionality is required in order line.
Configurator development environment will require exposure to testing of Java CX - which has killer ability to do server crash when its not fully tested or due to malfunction of code or inappropriate model setup. Definitely you would not prefer your transactional processing to be affected by model development/testing.

For Configurator development, you may need to expose unix box access, database access to Configurator model/CX developer.

When you have SR/issue in Configurator and Oracle gives fix for it, you may want to test it first in CZ test env, and not directly on the instance where transaction data is getting processed to ensure fix will work for you, and if any problem, you can report back to Oracle.

You will not prefer to affect transaction data processing performance with model development process. Keeping both of them on separate instance will be better utilization of resource and will avoid performance issues due to hardware bottleneck (agree that you need additional CZ instance but its worth doing it).

Usually companies maintain CZGOLD PROD and CZGOLD TEST instance. First do changes on Test instance and then migrate change on Prod. Now R12 Configurator has functionality called model migration, which makes it very easy to migrate model from one instance to another instance. Multiple divisions can work on their own CZGOLD Test instance and then finally migrate the model on CZGOLD Prod instance for model release.