Global Private Bank - IBM Db2 to Oracle Exadata

The Customer, one of the largest private banks in the United States, decided to evaluate and re-platform their Db2 UDB (Universal Database) environment onto Oracle Exadata to improve performance and reliability. Challenges with the Customer’s existing environment included availability, maintenance, and scalability of the legacy database platform which was leading to serious system performance issues in terms of data loads, aggregations and data “timeliness” across architectural tiers. In addition to this was the rising cost of Db2 resources and infrastructure amid decreasing Db2 market share.

Despite these challenges, there was a reluctance to migrate from Db2 rooted in fear of the unknown and their concerns about the high cost and complexity which had been quoted by mLogica’s competitors. Additionally, the Customer was using an unsupported IBM Db2 XML Extender, which was quite complex and was unsure whether it could be migrated, or the same functionality achieved, on any other database platform.

mLogica, in partnership with Oracle, presented their overall migration approach with detailed reference material, including case studies and use cases, along with ROI estimates. It became clear that mLogica could deliver migration to a more functional database, while removing a number of expected obstacles.

Next, onsite workshops were conducted with key stakeholders to take a deep dive into the migration process down to the nuts-and-bolts of how a translation happens, including what gets translated, what needs to remediated, and the effort required at their end. The detailed discovery questionnaires enabled the Customer to identify their own environment, which led to increased confidence in the migration process.

mLogica presented a demo of the mLogica Database Migration Studio (STAR*M). This raised the customer’s interest further as they were seeing a solution to migrate their 5K+ stored procedures and 10K+ database objects on an accelerated timeline. A Proof-of-Concept was performed on the IBM Db2 XML Extender to clearly showcase how it could be replaced by Oracle XML without going through an interim step of first migrating to IBM Native XML, and then to migrate to Oracle XML. This two-step approach would have required all of the applications to be tested twice and cost of the project would have increased significantly. Java base STAR*M utility was used to migrate IBM Db2 XML Extender directly to the Oracle XML.

Finally, mLogica presented a rough order of magnitude (ROM) which highlighted the customer-specific process, efforts, duration, cost estimates, and roles and responsibilities. The Customer became very comfortable with the migration process, delivery timeline and the cost. Additionally, they felt that there was far less business risk in migrating, than staying the course.

Moving to Oracle Exadata helped the Customer improve cost efficiencies and reduce maintenance activities, while minimizing business risks. With a modern, updated platform, the Customer was experiencing higher performance, with increased database scalability and system load speeds. A critical business application, now based on the Oracle Database Exadata, was fast and stable – a 50% performance improvement over its output on Db2.

Moving to Oracle Exadata has allowed the Customer to standardize their technology platforms and embark on a technology upgrade with a clear roadmap. The Customer’s development team is now able to focus their time on delivering new capabilities, instead of resolving performance issues.