IBM Sterling Order Management: 'Support Technical Exchange' session on 'Order Service overview with hands-on training'

Question 1: While history orders are archived using order archival agent, if there is a need to pull those orders using order search, will search work or does it require any restoration in order service?
Answer:
The orders that are reached its life in history tables are only archived to Order Service. As part of archive operation, they are also erased from OMS. However, the Order Search Service continue to have the summary of those orders along with an indication that they are archived. You can continue to search them on Order Search and view the summary. If any details are needed, same can fetched form Order Archive Service.
 
Question 2: What is the Cassandra keyspace required to be created for the order service with respect to PROD mode ?
Answer:
A separate Keyspace is needed. Define a naming pattern of your choice for Keyspace. Archive storage is expected to be huge, but you don't need a high-speed R/W disk. Replication factor can be minimum.

Question 3: Does order Archive agent delete data from OMS database, and move to Order Search system?
Answer: Yes.
 
Question 4: How do you delete the data if the OMS is in IBM cloud next Gen platform?
Answer: Order Service is only supported for OMS on Containers as of now.   
 
Question 5: How can we get the data from Order Search to our local BI platform such as Snowflake?
Answer:
Pull the data selectively from Order Service using retrieveOrder or retrieveOrderPart API, and insert to BI platform; Or see the option of exporting data from Cassandra and importing to BI platform. You may need to reach out to support team of both the systems.
 
Question 6: Have we established a clear definition for the "Order" entity, as this definition is crucial since it will determine the search capabilities within our Order Service ?
Answer:  
The definition of entity is different for archive and search. The 'archive' order entity includes the order entity and the entire set of sub-ordinate entities of order in OMS. The 'search' order entity is always a subset of attributes from the order entity and sub-ordinate entities of order, selected by user. It is modelled as an outline of Order data in OMS and you as a user, are required to choose the content. You can select the required attributes from entities Order, OrderLine, Payment, ShipTo addresses, BillTo address and so on from any sub-ordinate entities of order.
The shipment and sub-ordinate entities of shipment are not part of the 'archive' order entity. It cannot be included in the 'search' order entity either.

Question 7: Any restore from Archive functionality in the planned road map?
Answer: Not Planned.
 
Question 8: For SIP, we have keyspace like ks_cas, ks_iv, ks_promising, so similarly do we have anything for order-service, since the data will be saved in a particular keyspace?
Answer: When setting up 'cassandra.keyspace' property is required, and its value type is string. You can choose any valid string as the keyspace name, but it's recommended to follow a consistent naming convention of your choice for better organization and management.
 
Question 9: Is Order Service feature available in IBM OMoC Nextgen platform?
Answer: Order Service is only supported for OMS on Containers as of now.
 
Question 10: Does archiving data indefinitely significantly increase memory usage and costs?
Answer:
The data volume doesn't increase the memory usage. However, the Disk storage requirements increases when more and more data archived.
 
Question 11: Can OMS OOB API's pull data from order service ES index?
Answer: No.

Question 12: What is the need for a separate awaiting archival table? In one of the slides, it was shown that the archival agent reads records from both awaiting archival table and the order history table. If that's the case, can the archival agent not read the records from order history table itself and get those moved to Order Service Cassandra DB?
Answer:
The orders to be archived and the date to archive are tracked at the Awaiting Archive table. It also has other tracking data too and they are updated whenever needed. The order history table must be a copy of the order table, and no update is ever performed on any history data. So, order archive agent works on Awaiting Archive table and track its operations there.

Question 13: Is there a separate license cost for utilizing the order service component, or does this come in built with the latest DTK for a SaaS containerized offering?
Answer: Order Service is only supported for OMS on Containers as of now. For DTK setup, it comes built-in, but since its DTK setup, it is useful only for testing purpose.
 
Question 14: Is there any internal integration between order search and SIP?
Answer: No.
 
Question 15: What customers have access to order service - OMoC (IV), OMoC (IV+SIP)?
Answer: It is available for OMS on containers only as of now.
 
Question 16: Are there any associated fees or pricing considerations?
Answer: If this question is related to "Advanced Support" offering then please reach out to me on "jitebuge@in.ibm.com" for further discussion.  

Question 17: Is it possible to only sync sales order and return order to order search, and not any other types of orders?
Answer:
No. The outline of orders across document types are synced to Order Service. However, the document type is inherent to order index data model and hence you can always apply a pre-filter on your search queries to return only sales and return orders and aggregations on that.