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Enabling Marketing Analytics with Oracle Spatial

For over 20 years, Neustar’s unique capabilities have made it a leader in the field of responsible identity resolution.

Neustar provides intelligent identity-based solutions to help their clients drive greater efficiency and effectiveness. Neustar Identity Resolution Platform delivers actionable identity intelligence corroborated through 50 billion daily transactions across customer interactions, verifications, and digital interactions. Responsible identity resolution is the backbone of all their solutions across Security, Risk, Communications & Marketing.

Business Challenges

Many location intelligence and geospatial applications need to perform high volumes of spatial queries daily – with fast performance to service critical business applications. Neustar operates a cloud-based analytics platform called Element One, which provides real-time lead scoring, custom segmentation, and market analytics for its SaaS customers worldwide. The ElementOne platform runs 24/7, conflating data from 200-plus sources.

Neustar’s ElementOne solution combines location intelligence and spatial analysis with sophisticated analytics and predictive modeling. This gives their clients real-time insights into the effectiveness of their marketing programs and stores siting plans. Because the data is sensitive and needs to be available on demand, workflows must be highly secure, scalable, available, and reliable.

Why Oracle and the Solution

Performance is critical to Neustar, as it lets the company provide insights to customers in real-time. Support for spatial, JSON, and more in Oracle’s converged database also allows Neustar’s Element One platform to efficiently handle and process data from a variety of sources—without the communication and management overhead of specialized databases.

The high-level use cases are:

1. Foot traffic – by location and day part.
2. Segments/ Groups/ Audiences – day part demos, behaviours, etc.
3. Customer profiling and competitive conquesting – e.g., QSR, Bank, Retail.
4. Location planning and sponsorships – stadiums, real estate.
5. Closed loop analysis – digital out-of-home advertising.
6. Location data – as a conversion event (MTA).

Oracle Geospatial Analysis tools helped Neustar achieve key objectives like:

1. Querying spatial data using spatial studio tool to determine topological relationships.
2. Site Impact Analysis for current site replacement, cannibalization impact & site network optimization.
3. Heat Map themes for Identifying areas with greater concentrations of households with specific behaviour & dynamic regions.
4. The network data model for commute time and accessibility on large road networks and Linear calculations with LRS.
5. Consolidation and aggregation of large datasets into manageable chunks.

Benefits

• Strategic Market Planning
• Messaging and Creative Development
• Media Buying
• Competitive Analysis
• Site Optimization / Store Expansion
• Marketing Resource Deployment
• Improved Customer Acquisition / Cross-Sell/Retention

Technical Requirements:

Geospatial Footprint

• 6.3T database size
• 5+ billion geometries (from simple to highly detailed) cartographic, wireless territories, congressional districts, etc.
• ~1 billion mobile phone traffic regions
• US road network (71M nodes and 87M links)
• 57M US rooftops

High Availability/Security

• 3 node RAC + 4 DG
• DB Flashback + Snapshot Standby
• RMAN (local + remote backups)
• Online redefinition + comprehensive monitoring

Technology Stack

• Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition
• Spatial w\GeoRaster, Network Data Model & Map Visualization
• Partitioning
• Advanced Security Option
• Real Application Clusters
• Oracle Fusion Middleware 12cR2
• Oracle Cloud Control 13cR2

Performance/Application Development

• Spatial Vector Acceleration Result set cache, optimizer stats/histograms
• Partitioning for efficient management + access
• Database resource management for hybrid processes
• 430k lines of PL/SQL and Java stored procedures.
• DB object types & collections, pipeline tables, any data/ XML type/ json
• Oracle Text for biz matching & contextual search.

Results

Neustar’s customers have benefited from several performance and productivity improvements in the Oracle Database 19c release.

For example, Neustar’s customers can run near real-time analytics 24/7. In many cases, this has boosted customer confidence. Also, Neustar has been able to add new customers while retaining the same service levels. In addition, Neustar teams no longer need to employ manual techniques to meet their customers’ performance needs. Before migrating to the Oracle Database 19c release, Neustar had to build and maintain its own parsing and error-checking logic. The company replaced this with native diagnosis capabilities in Oracle Database 19c, gaining a 2X to 3X overall performance benefit. Oracle Database upgrades from prior releases have sped up the company’s spatial analysis, which now runs up to 300 times faster than before—dramatically boosting service levels and the quality of analytic insights for customers.

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