Customer

Our client was a UK-based retail chain, trading apparel and accessories online as well as through more than five hundred stores in the UK and Ireland, and almost two hundred stores in more than thirty countries. The company, with an annual revenue of GBP4 billion, is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 100 Index.

Technologies

Informix, Microsoft SQL Server

Challenge

Our client was running its IT systems on the Informix platform. Due to the growth of retail, and especially online retail, it started experiencing issues with the system performance. The client considered moving to SQL Server for some time but the risk was quite high and it took around three years to put the plan in place.

The client was not only looking to migrate its three big in-house developed applications but also to perform critical migration of schema and huge amount of data, including images, from Informix to Microsoft SQL Server. The scope of this migration included several thousand stored procedures and more than thousand tables with data.

The main expectation from the database migration was significantly improved performance as well as price/performance ratio. The idea was to handle the migration project using internal resources.

Qualification Process & Solution

The Ispirer team proposed free assessment support to the client during pre-sale engagement.

In order to understand our client’s specific needs, we organized a demo presentation of our migration tool. Conversion by SQLWays was demonstrated by Ispirer’s technical specialists and a technical discussion was held as well. Target SQL Server architecture was developed by client’s experts, and to make sure it was optimal for the performance purpose, the architecture review was arranged. It was delivered by a Microsoft partner who specialized in high performance computing (HPC) and performance tuning.

Ispirer SQLWays was then approved as the preferred tool for this migration project. Ispirer provided the company with a license for the SQLWays tool along with technical support. Highly-qualified SQLWays tool developers from Ispirer were assigned to the project to consult and provide support and tool customizations when required.

Results and Advantages

The customer was able to finish the migration project within expected period of time with the help of SQLWays. Its requirements pertaining to the target code were successfully achieved through the automated migration tool.

2012-2013