Good Case Studies :: Education :: Convertabase ::

1.	Customer Description:	Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) Firm
	Source Database:	Multiple formats (Access, Flat files, Excel Spreadsheets, EDI)
	Target Database:	SQL Server
	Project Size:	Telecommunications imports for five vendors (record formats may vary by region, service)
	Project Description:	The company needed regular imports of data as part of their mission critical business. The imported data was then used to analyze telecommunications expenditures predicting usage patterns and altering wireless telephone plans accordingly.
	Special Obstacles:	The format(s) of the billing data can change at any time with no notice. The imports needed to be "Point and click". Simplicity of interface and interactivity were key factors.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	In TEM, data import is the largest expense. After benefitting from Convertabase's tools and services, the TEM company sought a partnership and is re-marketing our imports along with their tools to their former competitors. (Now, these former competitors are their customers.)

2.	Customer Description:	A Large Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturer with over one billion dollars in annual sales
	Source Database:	Third-Party Learning Management System
	Target Database:	PeopleSoft Personnel System
	Project Size:	20 Tables Integrated; 300,000 records with aggregate 200 changes per day
	Project Description:	Integrated new database from a Learning Management System (LMS) into an existing PeopleSoft database. Educational courses taken by students needed to be fed back to the PeopleSoft Personnel System so that the corresponding departments were billed for the courses. In addition, personnel information maintained in PeopleSoft had to be updated, inserted or deleted as appropriate in the LMS database.
	Special Obstacles:	None
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	This effort required the use of the unique two-way migration capability of the Convertabase ETL technology. Using Convertabase tools, this effort required two man-months of effort.

3.	Customer Description:	Multilevel Marketing Company of Health Care Products with two hundred million gross revenue
	Source Database:	File Maker Pro
	Target Database:	SQL Server
	Project Size:	16 tables, Largest table was 1700 Columns, 3 million records
	Project Description:	This company had run their entire corporation based on the File Maker Pro database. The corporation could no longer keep their operations on such an antiquated database system and needed to move their information to a modern RDBMS.
	Special Obstacles:	While File Maker Pro has an ODBC driver, it does not support field names with spaces in them or tables more than 255 columns. Hence we had to treat the source database as a text, common delimited flat file.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	After exporting the source table to a CSV file by Macro Scripting the File Maker Pro program, the patent-pending DataParse wizard was used to pull the file apart into multiple correct table structures that could be used by the SQL server. This was accomplished in less than three man-weeks by performing test runs, prior to a full production migration transfer.

4.	Customer Description:	Government Agency
	Source Database:	Old LMS on a proprietary structured database (1)
	Target Database:	New LMS on a proprietary structured database (2)
	Project Size:	122 tables, 500,000 records, aggregate daily change of 1000 records
	Project Description:	Integrate and maintain the legacy Learning Management System (LMS) database with the new one. The agency wanted to continue use of the older LMS while transitioning to the newer one. The two databases had radically different database structures. The legacy LMS had over 100 tables that needed to be queried in order to maintain coherent data in both databases.
	Special Obstacles:	No structured tables on the Source LMS.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	A Package was developed to read the custom flat file using DataParse objects transforming them into an intermediate database, this database was then used to populate the real target database the customer was moving to. As departments moved over to the new data structure, their input was retrieved from the new database and inserted into the intermediate database, The custom structure of the flat files was then updated to reflect the new data keeping the business synchronized in both systems. The project required two man-months of effort for data transfer using Convertabase tools.

5.	Customer Description:	Pension Database for a West Coast City
	Source Database:	Flat files from a COBOL system
	Target Database:	SQL Server
	Project Size:	Over 200 target tables; 23 source files, source database held records for over 200,000 employees and all their family members; including divorced spouses, children, and any registered heirs
	Project Description:	Import and integrate an old payroll system with a new Pension management system.
	Special Obstacles:	New system utilized Active-X controls for the target system so that all business rules were enforced by the systems logic.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	Because of the COBOL flat file nature, the patent-pending DataParse wizard was needed to analyze and process the old payroll system into an industry standard format. Four man-months of effort for the conversion.

6.	Customer Description:	Investment Management Company
	Source Database:	Custom text delimited files
	Target Database:	MySQL
	Project Size:	One table had over 2 million records. A second table had over 5 million records. A third table had over 23 million records.
	Project Description:	Import several large non-standard text delimited files into a MySQL database.
	Special Obstacles:	Source data was in flat files with 2 to 23,000,000 records in a custom format.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	Using Convertabase tools, only three man-weeks were needed to transfer, process, test and complete the migration.

7.	Customer Description:	East Coast Health Insurance Company
	Source Database:	COBOL Flat files
	Target Database:	SQL Server
	Project Size:	2 tables; 3 million records in one table and 10 million records in another table.
	Project Description:	Merged and correlated an insured member list to their corresponding insurance companies. Source code to prior effort was lost.
	Special Obstacles:	Initial mapping defined by the customer was incorrect.
	Results Using Convertabase Tools and Technology:	The previous merge process ran for 72 hours. By using the Convertabase technology, the new merge process was reduced to 8 hours using the same hardware, an 88% improvement in efficiency! Entire project was completed in two man-months.