Government Agency Boosts ETL Performance with Oracle Pipelined Functions

About the Client

This government ministry is responsible for enforcing and collecting court-ordered child and spousal support payments. It ensures families receive the financial support they are entitled to by working directly with payors and recipients. Through compliance, monitoring, and enforcement mechanisms, it plays a vital role in promoting fairness, stability, and accountability for families.

The Challenges

The client's ETL reports, critical for reconciling child and spousal support payments, were taking over 3 hours to execute. This delay created cascading issues:

Performance bottlenecks – Long-running jobs impacted downstream Oracle and ETL processes.
Delayed operations – Accounting and billing teams struggled to consolidate data from multiple fragmented reports.
Inefficient workarounds – Splitting reports into smaller ones reduced load per job but increased overall consolidation time.
Business pressure – Reports needed to be available at the start of each business day to apply payments accurately.

Without a scalable solution, the agency risked operational delays and data integrity issues.

For another example of transforming long runtime jobs into fast, reliable processes, see how Elfonze helped a manufacturing client reduce manual work by 65% and speed decisions by 50%.

To see a similar transformation in operational cadence, check out how we used Master Production Scheduling to help clients plan smarter and produce faster with SmartMPS

The Solution

We re-engineered the ETL reporting process by introducing Parallel Pipelined Table Functions (PTFs) in Oracle PL/SQL.

Key Solution Elements:

Consolidated Reporting
- Designed a single consolidated report to replace multiple fragmented reports, reducing redundancy
See how Elfonze + Celonis revealed and resolved similar bottlenecks in our Business Process Excellence story
Parallel Pipelined Table Functions
- Replaced regular table functions with pipelined ones to improve performance
- Optimized memory usage by splitting queries into object types and processing results in streams
Performance Benchmarking
- Compared regular vs pipelined table functions to validate memory and execution time improvements
Future-Proofing
- Leveraged Oracle 12.2+ capability to run table functions without the TABLE operator, simplifying usage and extending scalability

Tools Used

Oracle Database 12c+|PL/SQL|Pipelined Table Functions|

Business Impact

The implementation delivered dramatic performance gains and improved operational efficiency:

ETL report runtime reduced from 3 hours → 2 minutes

Session memory optimize (22,872,064 vs. 65,536 with pipelined functions)

Zero disruption to existing processes while enabling faster period close

Greater confidence for business teams, with timely reports ready before daily operations began

Improved Oracle & ETL performance overall, with less system load during peak hours

Lovaraju Sakuru

Enterprise Application Lead

With over a decade of professional experience in the tech industry, has allowed me to leverage my extensive background in Oracle Applications and PL/SQL to drive enterprise architecture initiatives. I've cultivated a strong competency in streamlining project delivery and enhancing system functionalities. My core mission is to empower our team to deliver innovative solutions that align with our company's strategic vision, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.