7 Initial Data Collection

Package building requires data. If you have data collected already, the data can be used to populate the MTR tables or the MTR schema can be mapped to the existing data via views. However, if you have no data, you can use the REAPI methods addItem and addItems to collect data. Data collection occurs in the OracleAS Personalization Recommendation Engine (RE). For an RE to be up and running, there must be a package deployed in that RE. However, in order to build and deploy a package, you must have data in the MTR. To put it simply, you can't collect data unless you have enough data to build a package. You resolve this problem by populating the MTR with seed data and then using the seed data to build and deploy an initial package.

You create seed data on the system where Oracle is installed.

7.1 Creating and Removing Seed Data

OracleAS Personalization includes a script to populate an MTR with seed data and another script to remove the seed data from the MTR once enough data is collected in the MTR. The two scripts are in the directory $ORACLE_HOME/mp/admin/mtr:

insertMTRSeedRecords.sql (populates an unpopulated MTR with seed data)
removeMTRSeedRecords.sql (removes the seed data from the MTR once the initial package is built)

The OracleAS Personalization administrator can run these scripts when appropriate.

7.2 Preparing to Build Packages with Seed Data

Follow these steps to populate the tables required for package building:

Install OracleAS Personalization with an unpopulated MTR.
Configure synchronization settings in the MTR_CONFIGURATION table appropriately.
Create an MTR connection and allow synchronization for the data source types that you intend to collect.
Log in to SQL*Plus as the MTR account that you created using the OracleAS Personalization Schema Creation Wizard.
Run insertMTRSeedRecords.sql.
Create a package using the default selections.
Create an RE Farm with at least one RE in it. Use the advanced settings to specify the customer data synchronization interval.
Build the package.
Deploy the package to the RE Farm that you created in step 7.
Log in to SQL*Plus using the MTR account that you created during installation; run removeMTRSeedRecords.sql.
Populate or map the following tables with data for your application:
- MTR_ITEM: This table is the site catalog. When the collected data is saved in the MTR, data corresponding to nonexistent items are thrown away as part of the validation check. So, if the MTR_ITEM table is empty, the collected data is thrown away.
- MTR_CUSTOMER: The customer-IDs are expected to be managed by the site. Hence the MTR_CUSTOMER table should be populated or mapped with at least the ID attribute before the data is written to the MTR. The data values for other attributes can be collected via the data collection API.
- MTR_ATTR_NAME_TO_ID_MAP and MTR_BIN_BOUNDARY: These tables should be populated with the mapping information that maps attribute names to numeric identifiers and the bin boundaries, respectively.
  
  You must specify bin boundaries for all data source types that you plan to collect.
After these tables are populated, the OracleAS Personalization administrator must run the following script, which populates the MTR_ATTR_ID_BIN_BOUNDARY table:

populate_mtr_attr_id_bin_boundary.sql

Now collect data from your Web site. After you collect data for an appropriate amount of time, you can build packages based on the collected data.