Building Maintenance Services Company – IBM Db2 to Oracle 12c Migration

The Customer is an American Fortune 1,000 public company that provides residential and commercial services to restore homes and businesses after water, fire and mold damage. They were running JD Edwards E1 on Db2 without customizations, and were facing performance and scalability challenges with this legacy system, including operational problems of dwindling support, scarcity of resource availability and escalating costs.

mLogica was brought in to provide a complete assessment for a planned database migration from Db2 to Oracle 12c, initially on-premise and subsequently on cloud, including scope of work, roles and responsibilities, and timeline and budget estimates.

mLogica conducted a comprehensive assessment of the existing database, allowing us to demonstrate to the Customer the benefits they could expect after the planned migration by contrasting their current Db2 environment to the target Oracle 12c system. The team reviewed and finalized a detailed roadmap for the migration, including a comprehensive analysis of the existing Db2 environment, including:

• Platform characteristics and data model, both logical and physical
• Key business application integration in terms of language and access methods
• SLAs; both operational and disaster recovery
• Data governance and standards
• Processing in terms of data quality and cleansing
• Migration assessment, including identifying target architecture and analysis of database structures, objects conversion and migration of data

Based on this assessment, mLogica moved to execute the migration strategy, starting with a full backup of the Customer’s source database. The team then leveraged mLogica’s STAR*M automated database migration tool to capture Db objects, data structures and data from the source Db2 system, then refactored and loaded the schemas into Oracle 12c databases in two migration runs.

Once the database migration was completed and data restored, the system was verified and tested for success. mLogica worked to convert and integrate all interfaces and applications running on the platform to ensure they worked efficiently on the newly migrated Oracle database.

Once the migration and conversion processes were completed, the team also conducted extensive testing and quality assurance processes.

The migration team saved a substantial amount of time and manual effort by leveraging mLogica’s STAR*M automated database migration tool, which refactored the DDL and SQL Code from Db2 to Oracle PL/SQL in a fraction of the time it would have taken to convert by hand. With the responsive and resource-rich Oracle 12c environment, the Customer’s previous system performance issues with data loads, aggregations and data timeliness across architectural tiers were eliminated. The migration to the new environment also meant that the scalability and processing speed problems were remediated.

Migrating away from a legacy platform that is deeply ingrained in a company’s IT footprint can be a daunting prospect for an organization of any size, which is why mLogica’s project experience is invaluable when making the shift to a new database. Leveraging mLogica’s STAR*M automated database migration and refactoring tool allowed the team to quickly create error-free converted DB objects, data structures and SQL code from the source Db2 database to the target Oracle database.

When transferring application data, it is vital to have resources working on the project who have the expertise to resolve problems as they arise, plan for all contingencies and ensure your system and internal resources are ready to run smoothly when the project ends.

Our Customer was very satisfied with our comprehensive migration methodology, which allowed them to complete their transfer to the Oracle 12c environment in a timely manner while strengthening their IT capabilities now and into the future.