Database Consolidation: Nightmares Undressed

by Roberta Murphy

Want to know what keeps me terrorized at night?

Database management. I am in an urgent race against time–and my nightmare is one that haunts major corporations throughout the world– from retailers to brokerage firms to telecoms to the U.S. Government itself.

In our San Diego real estate practice, I have until December 30 to migrate several hundred clients and their specific and detailed property requests over to another improved database program that will continue to email the same meaningful information they are now receiving. You see, most of us are hobbling along with databases that are not compatible (because they are on different platforms with different vendors) and refuse to speak or communicate with each other. It is also next to impossible to migrate the detailed information from one vendor to another because of proprietary programming. The unpleasant alternative is to do it by hand. In our situation, we have accumulated client information from one source (that was started eight years ago), that is quite separate from real estate client information that has accumulated for the past five years on another vendor’s platform. The problem has now grown to nine distinct databases with detailed information that cannot be migrated from one to another because each database collects different types of volunteered information from web and blogsite visitors–and stores that data on proprietary systems.

Our goal is to condense this information onto a meaningful program that is retrievable and migratable from one system to another.

If our real estate practice operated at the big-time enterprise level, I would be calling ANTs Software today. ANTs now offers the solution for database consolidation, with their ANTs Compatibility Server (ACS). It is a plug-in which would allow Oracle databases to migrate IBM’s DB2, or for Sybase to migrate to Microsoft, or for Oracle to migrate to Sybase–or whatever combinations are possible therein.

Compatiblity between databases has become an enormous issue in computing of all sorts because just like me and on a much larger scale, governments and corporations usually have old legacy database programs that cannot be migrated to other systems without enormous effort and expense. That is why the ANTs Compatibiity Server is such whiz-bang technology. It is hoped that solutions such as what ACS has to offer the big guys, may eventually filter down to smaller users such as myself.

It’s only a dream, but how great would it be if ANTs’ database miracle–or something like it–could be installed on my computer before December 30? The clock is painfully ticking….