Customer

Our client was one of the top three supermarket chains in the UK. Besides catering to over one thousand traditional groceries stores and superstores, the company offers a wide range of quality banking and insurance products and services as well as household products.

Technologies

HP Neoview, Teradata

Challenge

In the mid-2000s, our client moved to the HP Neoview data warehousing platform and was running it until the beginning of 2011, when HP announced it will no longer be selling Neoview data although it plans to continue supporting the product until 2014. Part of the HP exit strategy was advising and supporting the existing clients, helping them to choose the alternative platform, and move to the new DW safely.

In our client’s case, Teradata was chosen as the target database. Any large-sized retail business usually stores huge amount of data and runs different business analytics/business intelligence tools and reports in order to analyze customers’ shopping behavior, define the market trends, and use predictive analytics for better sales and procurement forecast.

HP and Teradata teamed up for the project, and HP asked Ispirer to add special capabilities into SQLWays Wizard for the Neoview to Teradata migration direction.

The challenging part of the migration included business logic and embedded SQL. The total number of lines of SQL in the EDW Batch and the reporting tools (SAS, Microstrategy, etc.) to be migrated was up to 0.5 million LOC.

Solution

The client built a project team which included three major systems integrators and vendors. Ispirer’s migration tool SQLWays was recommended by HP and approved by TD as a tool for this migration. Ispirer provided the company with an SQLWays annual license along with technical support. SQLWays tool developers were assigned for the project.

Results and Advantages

All customer requirements pertaining to the target code were successfully implemented by Ispirer Toolkit. The migration was performed within the expected timeframe and budget.

One of the major advantages of the proposed solution was the possibility to automate the database migration process in order to minimize manual interventions and receive more consistent code after the conversion.

September, 2012-2013