During the previous challenge I brought up the fact that Santa’s Workshop acquired Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Unfortunately, with the holidays, this normally big news item got covered up and didn’t receive the press it deserved. Luckily Santa was able to solve the challenge of getting candy to all the good boys and girls.

The paraphrased challenge went something along the lines of:

Now that Santa has the candy capabilities, he still needs to work out the pickup locations for the candy to ensure he gets them just in time to be delivered to the appropriate kids. Especially since Wonka decided to break up his candy customers up by region while Santa has everything centralized at the North Pole Data Center.

What can Santa do, and what considerations should be made to ensure the list of kids is in sync in time for the holidays?

This is another one of those integration challenges for merging data. Especially combining a single master list (Santa’s list of good children) with Wonka’s list of customers per region.

Santa realized that he couldn’t just bring over all of the Wonka customers. Some are kids who don’t believe in him anymore and others are naughty kids that should be getting coal instead of coal shaped candy.

This means that he’d need to find a way to match the kids from Wonka’s list to his list. Additionally, there are some kids that could be customers in different regions (kids living with other family members part of the time or away at boarding schools such as Hogwarts).

However Santa does have an elvish IT group that was able to put together an aggregation service that would feed directly into his list. That aggregator took data from Wonka’s factories, combined it based on the considerations above, and fed a single stream of data into his list. This allowed the Wonka customer lists to remain intact and not disturb their normal customers while providing a feed for Santa’s list ensuring all kids got the candy they were hoping for based on their nearest Wonka shop.

How did you do? What would you have done differently?

cab