US State Agency - Sybase IQ to Oracle 12c Migration

The Customer is a prominent US state agency providing healthcare and human services within its state boundaries. It was using a data warehousing solution developed about two decades back built on Sybase IQ platform, which was rapidly reaching end-of-life and resulting in major operating challenges. Consequently, the Customer was looking to replace their hardware, upgrade or replace existing software, and migrate data for their Client Services Data Warehouse (CSDW).

mLogica was brought in and ran a complete assessment and analysis of the hardware and software environment so they could provide holistic solutions for a complete modernization of the system. mLogica also conducted proof of concept to ensure that agency’s data load and performance requirement will be met for the end state architecture.

The Customer’s existing system was creating a number of operational challenges, chief among them being:

• The need to securely store all data, active and historical, and retain them indefinitely. Rapidly growing from its 150 TB base, this presented a big challenge.
• Eliminate the 5-hour time-lag in their Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) process that was resulting in half-days’ worth of work loss due to lack of user access.

mLogica’s primary solution, which would remediate all of the Customer’s challenges, was to migrate the existing Sybase IQ v15.4 platform to an Oracle 12.2c Super Cluster. This migration took care of the Customer’s increasing storage requirements, as well as gave them access to advanced features such as the Oracle Partitioning with Automatic Data Optimization and Heat Maps to maintain data as per its frequency of use; an Exadata snapshot to provide database clones with minimal storage requirements; Hybrid columnar compression, advanced row compression to provide compression; Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), and Data Redaction to prevent unauthorized access.

Along with data migration, mLogica worked successfully to convert and integrate all interfaces and applications running on the platform to ensure they worked efficiently on the migrated Oracle database. This included the remediation and porting of all ETL jobs and scripts on Java, MFC and SAS DI to Oracle code.

Key to this successful transformation was mLogica’s highly automated migration engine, STAR*M, which worked individually with the embedded Structured Query Languages (such as T-SQL) embedded within applications to convert them to Oracle PL/SQL (Procedural Language) code.

Once the migration and conversion processes were completed and tested by mLogica, the Customer was assured that their new system faced none of the hurdles, delays and storage issues that had hampered performance earlier. The Oracle Super Cluster and updated applications were now more than capable of handling the needs of millions of its patients in a timely, reliable and efficient manner as well as storing that growing body of data indefinitely.