Service Provider Chooses Ispirer for PostgreSQL Transformation

Using PostgreSQL, the global consulting leader has minimized system downtime, improved their infrastructure performance and reliability, automated operations, and empowered their technical teams to focus on data-driven strategies.

Results

Background

Our customer is one of the US largest diversified consulting service providers, serving 150 countries with over 300,000 employees. Due to this fact, they collect and process enormous amounts of data. However, the infrastructure supporting their operations was proprietary, expensive, and underperforming. In order to reduce costs, but more importantly, stay competitive in the market, the customer initiated a digital transformation journey.

Challenge

The company processes hundreds of thousands of transactions in their databases every day. Tracking this level of traffic, and then determining how to improve performance, has become an increasingly difficult task for the customer's team. The systems had to support and quickly process a growing volume of content, and the company’s outdated database system simply could not stay abreast. Moreover, there were high overhead costs associated with managing this infrastructure, as well as expensive software licensing.

The technical team decided that the environment needed to be updated and that the existing database system should be improved to support the growing transactional load of customers. However, the team realized that increasing the capacity of the environment and supporting more transactions would lead to increased costs due to license fees for an outdated Db2 system and maintenance costs. Their first move to reduce costs and improve system performance was to adopt open source technology.

Solution

As part of the digital modernization journey, the customer decided to migrate their Db2 LUW 12 database system to PostgreSQL, which provided the required scalability, efficiency, and performance at a lower cost.

Having studied the offers on the migration service market, the customer's team determined that Ispirer Migration Service was the most appropriate solution to handle the migration of their database system. The company chose Ispirer because of our proven track record in delivering best-in-class end-to-end database and application migration services enhanced with automation solutions.

For the migration project implementation, one of the major challenges was that the customer provided only SQL files for all objects. Ispirer technical experts did not have the opportunity to restore the database on our side due to the complexity of the source code working with different schemas.

The project was divided into 3 stages:

At the 1st stage, 25,000 lines of the Db2 LUW code were converted using Ispirer Toolkit. After the conversion, the Ispirer technical team analyzed the migration results.

The main difficulties identified and resolved by the Ispirer database department:

• All stored procedures of the source database contained handlers. The current conversion of handlers in the toolkit did not fit the requirements of the customer's project. It was necessary to implement new conversion rules in order to reproduce the logic of the handlers in the target PostgreSQL database.
• Transactions worked differently in the source system and in the target one.
• Lack of test cases and data. The stored procedures were checked at random.

At the 2nd stage, the core rules, which resolved the above mentioned issues, were added to the tool, thereby significantly expanding it for the Db2 LUW to PostgreSQL migration direction. During the stage, Ispirer successfully converted the rest of the Db2 LUW code to PostgreSQL.

At the final stage, after testing and making minor manual code fixes, we delivered the fully operational PostgreSQL database to the customer.

Outcome

In just 3 months, Ispirer effectively completed the database migration from Db2 LUW to PostgreSQL. The total project scope was 260,000 lines of the converted code.

Ispirer Migration Service became central to the customer's digital transformation for the following key reasons:

• Switching to PostgreSQL allowed the company to attain a significant boost in the speed of executing complex queries, improved work with JSON and processing of OLTP queries. The transition empowered the customer with a range of open-source add-ons, such as a wide option of indexes to optimize data processing.
• The flexibility of the open source solution provided the customer with a number of features, such as built out custom functions, adding new data types, index methods, writing code from different programming languages without recompiling the database.
• Replacing a proprietary solution such as Db2 with an open source alternative like PostgreSQL helped the customer reduce costs and vendor lock-in, as well as create a more sustainable and long-term operating model that will allow them to grow with the clients.