on a particular telecommunication network. Decoding / Enrichment and Loading of CDRs Once the TPS has successfully retrieved all the CDR batches, its first task is to decode the CDRs into human readable (ASCII) format. This is probably one of the most important functions of the TPS within the telecommunication industry, as any error in the decoding process will result in inaccurate, unreliable information being passed onto downstream processes and ultimately to the reports viewed by the management. The TPS usually consists of standard functionality to decode all standard CDR encoding protocols like XML, CSV and ASN.1. Should a particular platform vendor encode CDR's in non standard protocols, customization on the TPS is required. Vendors are then required to supply detailed CDR specifications to the suppliers of the TPS in order to enhance the TPS to recognize the CDR formats and also detailed explanations of which information is contained within the CDR about a particular subscriber's activity on the network. Upon successful completion of the decoding, the decoded CDR batches are then checked for duplicate records. Duplicate CDRs are discarded and reported on. The TPS administrators are responsible for verifying the CDRs flagged as duplicates, are in fact true duplicates. Depending on the TPS software used, the processes following the CDR duplicate level checking can differ. Some high-end TPS combines information from various elements to create master CDRs before being loaded into the 'datastore', whilst a lower-end or entry-level TPS directly loads data upon completion of CDR duplicate checking. The 'datastore' used by the TPS consists of a Relational database management system. Some high-end enterprise RDMS includes the likes of ORACLE, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. The choice of RDMS to use, is usually driven by company policy, price and recommendations from the TPS supplier. The RDMS should at least be able to support the volumes of CDRs generated by the particular network. Once all intermediate processing on the CDR batches have completed, the TPS can now load the data into the particular 'datastore'. Separate entities within the RDMS is used to store the data from the different network platforms. The architecture and layout of the RDMS is usually dictated by the particular TPS. The different entities within the RDMS now contains detailed records of each transaction which occurred on any particular platform within the network. Advanced application administrators can now query the detailed data by means of SQL. Depending