Shanghai Mobile's Detailed Bill Inquiry System Cloud Transformation — Accelerating Migration, Reducing Costs

Shanghai Mobile is one of China Mobile's pilot operators for the cloud transformation of its detailed billing query system. With nearly 20 million mobile subscribers, it generates approximately 30 TB of call detail records each month. The legacy system, built on minicomputers and disk arrays, could no longer meet the demands for detailed billing queries and statistical analysis. To enhance customer satisfaction, improve query response speed and scalability, and support internal business needs, Shanghai Mobile urgently required a cloud-based platform transformation.

Shanghai Mobile’s original detailed bill query system consisted of a pre-billing database, a CDR database, and an on-demand system. During operation, it exposed various issues, including slow query performance, slow data statistics, limited storage capacity, and poor scalability. To address these, the cloud transformation project must: store six months of historical call records plus one month of current records, replace the existing CDR database, and ensure fast data ingestion; support various statistical functions and report generation, providing technical support and optimization for statistical analysis; support CDR reprocessing, historical CDR queries, near-real-time complex CDR queries, and bulk CDR export.

The project adopted a system solution built on the GBase 8a MPP Cluster distributed parallel database, running on X86 PC Servers with Linux and SATA storage, to replace the existing system and establish a cloud-architected detailed record query system centered on columnar storage and high compression. The current implementation uses the new version 8611 federated architecture cluster with symmetric deployment: 12 management and computing nodes, 2 loading servers, storing 6+1 months of detailed records, achieving highly compressed storage for user data backups, enabling real-time loading of detailed records, and reducing query response time to under 3 seconds. The detailed record query system is built upon the cloud storage architecture of GBase 8a MPP Cluster, supporting the detailed record query, billing, and business analysis systems, realizing "one database for three uses", demonstrating the system's advantages of high performance, high compression, and high availability.

• System Cloudification: The CDR cloud migration project actively supports China Mobile headquarters' goal of "actively exploring cloud computing initiatives," reducing system operation and maintenance costs while improving business scalability;

• One Database, Three Use Cases: Leveraging the cloud platform, the system delivers ad-hoc queries, CDR-based business analysis and statistics, and data backup, demonstrating the value of "One Database, Three Use Cases";

• Performance Boost: Ad-hoc queries achieve response times within seconds, and monthly data queries complete in under 3 seconds; statistical performance improved by over 10x; high compression ratios save significant storage space—data that previously required one month of storage can now be stored for six months;

• On-Demand Scalability: Cluster nodes can be added at any time based on demand, ensuring linear performance improvement as nodes scale.