Global Marketing Agency - SAP IQ Managed Services and Database Optimization

The Customer is one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the world with footprints in 60 countries. Their international offices access an 18 Terabyte database.

mLogica was brought in to replace existing managed services support for the Customer’s SAP IQ database environment and to streamline its operation. The existing database architecture, in heavy use by their multiple-end customers, was proving increasingly inadequate and expensive; unable to keep pace with the Customer’s operational growth and usage. For example, the database was slow almost on a regular basis, its size in Terabytes growing substantially, rapidly and unsustainably.

Over the initial 6-month work period, mLogica’s Managed Services (MS) team, worked directly with the Customer to review the complete IQ environment and provided key observations and recommendations to improve performance. These recommendations included suggestions on restructuring the database, incorporating indexes and query plans and applications enhancement. The MS team also established a 24/7 helpdesk team to monitor the environment and help identify, prioritize and resolve issues based on criticality levels, by engaging a team of senior DBAs. The team also developed a Technical Operations Manual (TOM) that detailed the entire database environment including environment details, SLAs and SOPs.

mLogica also actively engaged senior database administrators in recommending changes to the architecture deficiencies faced by the Customer in day to day operations, enabling them to stabilize the environment. The mLogica team also worked on the IQ upgrade from v.15.4 to IQ v.16.1, which was quite complex and challenging due to the unique environment, engaging the SAP Technical Support to fix the performance issues affecting the IQ upgrade.

The MS team also isolated, identified and suggested remedial actions on the issue of server overload and slow response times brought on by a combination of excessive user connections at peak times, active users not “logging off” when done, and the creation and alteration of hundreds upon hundreds of tables, unnecessarily consuming server resources and creating performance issues affecting all database processes.

The Customer benefited with a 24/7 team of specialists, who were not only monitoring their environment, but were able to provide key architectural recommendations, established best practices based on observations and issues resolutions, recommended changes to application rules where necessary, redistributed server loads for higher availability and optimized the Customer’s resource allocation. As a result, the Customer’s system is now very stable, the number of alerts and warnings have gone down substantially, as has the downtime due to system bounces.

The Customer truly believes that they now have a support team, which is a “trusted advisor” in a true sense.