DB Migration project (for an undisclosed client)

Business

Lot’s of companies, from small firms to large enterpises are running old software; sometimes very old.

When such software itself usually working fine and does its job, maintaince of it quite often is expensive and required resources and efforts the companies want to minimize or avoid completely.

POS software, ATM front-end and back-end, industrial application etc are just tine part of possible examples of widely-used old software.

The essential part of virtually all applications is some type of database engine. When user interface, network-related routinies, hardware — servers, working stations — are easily upgrading from time to time, the database structure is the most stable and constant part of the application design.

The problem is that maintaining outdated or some kind of unique database engines required hiring qualified software engeneers with all the consequences. Sometimes database engine support is not available anymore. Sometimes the support is excessively expensive.

Our client, a large health insurance company (they didn’t allow us to disclose their name), wanted to complete unification of databases and asked us to migrate their DBs and corresponding business application to MS SQL. These were Sybase Adaptive Server, Informix, old Oracle’s and DB/2.

Implementation

We were responsible for data migrating, altering database-related routinies, testing and QA in general, and maintaining migrated software for transition period (approximately two month). Our client was responsible for obtaining all the licenses (Microsoft freely provided them licenses when migrating from Oracle) and dealing with legal issues.

Well written software has an abstraction layer to isolate database storage from business logic. Many of the applications we dealt requires only data and structure migration, when database altering was easy. Sybase, historically, is very much like MS SQL, while others needed considerable redesign both DB desing and application.

What our customer got:

Accurate costing and sizing of the migration.
The expertise necessary to help control the risk associated with database and related applications’ migration.
Cost effective database migrations.
Experienced experts moving applications and associated databases from one platform to another.

Services We Provided

Replaced MySQL, Microsoft Access, Informix, IBM DB2, Sybase, Oracle databases with MS SQL
Consolidating your sparse or smaller datastores.
Migration analysis, cost evaluation and planning.
Risk analysis and risk mitigation planning.
Schema re–modelling and migration.
Data migration services.
Query analysis and optimization.
Analysis, migration, and optimization of stored routines and other database objects.
Analysis and migration of client connectors.