UBS Switzerland Proves Oracle Financials Can Run the World's Largest General Ledger

"Particularly in the world of banking, high performance and reliability are critical system requirements. Our benchmark test shows that Oracle software can reliably deliver one of the world's largest general ledgers and still fulfill our stringent requirements for performance--an impressive result." -- Thierry Schaffluetzel, Project Director, GEAR CH, UBS Switzerland

Two-Terabyte General Ledger Runs on Oracle

As one of the world's premiere banking institutions, UBS Switzerland has always been at the forefront of developing new financial systems and technologies. In a recent initiative, for example, UBS is pioneering a new business solution that combines financial and management accounting in a single system. Called GEAR for Global Environment for Accounting and Reporting, the new system will address the growing array of business and statutory reporting requirements and at the same time boost the quality and efficiency of its accounting processes.

UBS's system breaks new ground in computing sophistication, adopting a multidimensional approach to accounting that enables the bank to process huge numbers of balance positions and millions of daily postings. The overall UBS accounting architecture includes a central accounting logic, ledger system, valuation processes, and reporting layer. For the ledger system, UBS selected Oracle General Ledger, a component of Oracle Financials.

Before launching the GEAR system, UBS needed to prove its viability under high-volume business conditions. As a result, UBS, Oracle and hardware-supplier Sun Microsystems commissioned a test at Sun's iForce Ready Center in Volketswil, Switzerland. The benchmark test simulated a real-life business environment with 500 million accounting postings and balances per month--involving more than two terabytes of data.

High-Level Project Goals

• Import and post at least 10 million postings in less than one hour


• Perform a period open at month end in less than 12 hours


• Extract 500 million balances in less than 60 minutes and calculate the daily balance sheet in less than 30 minutes

Why Oracle?

UBS chose Oracle for its global leadership, expertise and proven ability to meet UBS' exacting requirements. Oracle and Sun also had the technical ability and size to design and install the test platform, which included a standard version of Oracle General Ledger software. Helping with the test were teams from Oracle Consulting Switzerland, Oracle Switzerland, Oracle EMEA, Oracle Product Development, Sun Switzerland, and Sun Oracle Applications Technology Center.

Testing the World's Largest General Ledger

The UBS benchmark test was a success, meeting all of the performance criteria established by the tream. In the sheer volume of data processed, it represented the world's largest implementation of Oracle General Ledger. As such, UBS's system presented huge challenges in terms of operability, manageability, and throughput. Even a simple update of a column can take hours. But with proper tuning--a key part of the benchmark test--the challenges were met.

Now, more than 20 million postings can be processed in two hours with the CPU running at a 90% usage level. Another major goal of tuning was to align the parallel long-running activities. By taking advantage of Oracle Database technology such as partitioning, hash joins and parallel queries, the team succeeded in extracting a 200-gigabyte table in less than an hour.

Future Plans

While the test used simulated data, it followed UBS' business rules as strictly as possible, and the results were successful in convincing UBS to proceed with a full implementation.

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