Financial Services Provider Reduced Migration Costs by 5 times

Client profile

Loxon is a global provider of integrated lending and risk management solutions for the financial industry. Headquartered in Budapest, the company provides services all over the world. The primary focus is serving major world banks, including Raiffeisen, Erste, GE Money, OTP, Societe Generale, and UniCredit.

Objective

The company approached Ispirer with a request to consolidate all the SQL Server and Sybase IQ databases on one platform - Oracle.

Challenge

Loxon managed a complex database environment with 13 SQL Server databases and 1 Sybase IQ database. They faced several critical challenges that hindered their ability to manage and maintain corporate systems efficiently:

• Separate maintenance of different databases required which made the process nonoptimal.
• Lack of sufficient expertise in SQL Server and Sybase IQ made it difficult to maintain the databases.
• Tight deadlines rendered it impossible to migrate databases manually, as it could lead to downtime and affect business processes.

Due to the peculiarities in the source code, manual migration of SQL code would take ~1 year, so the customer was looking for an automated solution.

Solution

As a standard practice, clients typically want to verify the product's quality and assess its performance firsthand. The project began with the client receiving an extended demo version of Ispirer Toolkit to get acquainted with its functionality, test conversion on the part of the code, and evaluate the conversion quality.

Based on the tool testing stage, the client considered the automation to be sufficient automation that our solution provides would significantly reduce the migration time.

In addition, the client appreciated the high-quality support from Ispirer experts. Taking into account the conversion quality and reasonable cost of the product, the client made a choice in favor of Ispirer Toolkit as a tool for migrating to an Oracle database.

Any migration project starts with a thorough assessment. For this purpose, Assessment Wizard is a helping hand to analyze the systems in the shortest possible time and provide a complete picture of the project. The tool provides a detailed estimate of time and complexity, enabling more accurate migration planning and eliminating potential risks.

Assessment Wizard analyzed the customer’s databases and counted ~1 mln lines of SQL code needed to be migrated, including stored procedures, functions, views and triggers. Having received an accurate assessment of the project’s completion time, the Ispirer team provided a detailed project roadmap for moving SQL Server and Sybase IQ to Oracle.

Considering the specifics of the customer’s databases, the Ispirer team suggested customizing the tool to reach the highest possible automated conversion speed. The volume of databases required to perform 18 customizations (SQL Server to Oracle) and 24 customizations (Sybase IQ to Oracle). Here are some examples of key customizations for SQL Server to Oracle migration:

• Conversion of column NAME of system table sys.tables
• Converting ORDINAL_POSITION, TABLE_NAME and IS_NULLABLE system table columns
• Improved coalesce conversion

Major customizations for Sybase IQ to Oracle migration include:

• conversion of LOCATION statement (connection to remote servers), including cases of dynamic code
• proper conversion of RETURN N (where N is integer) to use it in Oracle procedure
• solution for loading data from file, i.e. construction LOAD [ INTO ] TABLE FROM | USING [ CLIENT ] FILE

Team Composition

3 migration experts from Ispirer, including software engineer and database experts

3 database experts from the client side with expertise in SQL Server, Sybase IQ, and Oracle, were involved.

Technologies

SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase IQ

Benefits and Results

The Loxon team achieved several milestones as a result of Ispirer-Loxon partnership:

• Combined all former SQL Server and Sybase IQ databases into a single Oracle database.
• Reduced operating costs by eliminating SQL Server and Sybase IQ license fees.
• Achieved a 6-month migration timeline with 92% automation.
• Reduced costs by 3-5 times through automation compared to manual database migration.