Building a financial decision support system with Oracle

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is the world's leading particle physics research laboratory. It is a truly global organization, collaborating with more than 500 research institutes around the world. The laboratory is currently working on the construction of its largest and most complex scientific instrument ever, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due for completion in 2007. Under the current economic climate, however, the laboratory, along with many other businesses and organizations, is having to face shrinking resources and reduced staff levels. Since CERN is expected to continue to grow, it will be forced to achieve higher productivity with fewer resources. In the area of administrative information systems, the situation described above led us to the decision to use Oracle's Data Warehousing concepts and J2EE for the implementation of a scalable and flexible financial decision support system with a low maintenance cost. This paper outlines the experiences drawn from this implementation, from the logical design to the technical architecture.