Grupo Águas do Brasil gains business insights with Oracle Cloud

One the largest private sanitation companies in Brazil, Grupo Águas do Brasil wanted greater visibility of business performance across operational, commercial, and financial divisions in pursuit of growth and better customer service. Consolidating data from over 100 transactional databases from each division and the 15 municipalities served required a more powerful data warehousing operation.

The extract transform load (ETL) process from integrating data from the plethora of operational databases was cumbersome, taking more than 12 hours to run—and frequently failing. The company’s database administrators were not able to monitor this process and, upon its failure or cancellation, needed to spend time and effort to try to identify the cause of the problem.

Due to the increasing amount of data from daily operations, combined with the sanitation company’s plans for growth both organically and via acquisition, Grupo Águas do Brasil considered a cloud data warehouse solution for greater performance and  on demand scalability.

After a thorough evaluation process, the company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Autonomous Database because it offered much better price-performance ratio compared to AWS and Azure. OCI was also a natural fit for Grupo Águas do Brasil considering that 95% of its existing databases were from Oracle. Company leaders recognized they would therefore reap additional performance benefits.

Grupo Águas do Brasil initiated an internal business intelligence project by deploying Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse on OCI. Using Oracle Data Integrator ensured seamless data integration from more than 100 on-premises transactional databases into its Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to maximize use of operational, commercial, and financial data and to improve water sanitation processes across 15 municipalities.

By using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s automatic indexing functionality, the group significantly accelerated its ETL processes. Previously this was performed overnight, taking longer than 12 hours and frequently failing. Today, the company manages the entire process in less than 2 hours without errors.

With Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s intuitive monitoring dashboards, Grupo Águas do Brasil’s database administrators now have a complete, real-time overview of the ETL process, and can see at a glance the status of the operation along with execution timeframes. This represents a considerable improvement over the previous setup, when technicians would need to cancel the operation after several hours and then spend further time trying to understand what had gone wrong—for example, identifying either a loading or database problem.

The group has seen substantial cost benefits thanks to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s seamless scalability, which enables the company to automatically increase its capacity by orders of magnitude—and scale back down when those resources are no longer needed—without needing to invest in expensive on-premises hardware. The scaling capability has been particularly beneficial for Grupo Águas do Brasil considering its recent acquisition of Cedae—which has almost doubled the company’s size—as well as its new contract to deliver sanitation services to 21 municipalities in Rio de Janeiro.

Additionally, the company has greatly increased system stability across development, process data reconciliation, and production. With Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse now in place, the company looks forward to phase two of its BI project, which will use Kubernetes, AI, and predictive analytics to realize more value from operational data. This will include even more in-depth analysis of the data coming from a multitude of industrial sensors located throughout its water management facilities. Until now, the company has been using Microsoft Power BI for all data analysis, but it is currently considering moving to Oracle Analytics Cloud for the performance improvements it would bring.