2/1/2010 1
Database Consolidation (or how to turn 94 databases into 1)
German State of Hesse’s Forestry Agency now utilizing state-of-the-art IT, even in the forest
From managing the State Forest to selling venison, the services
of the "Landesbetrieb Hessen-Forst" (German State of Hesse, Agency
for Forestry), with its 41 forestry offices and around 440 forest
management areas, generates annual income of approx. EUR 200
million. To process its business operations, in addition to its own
self-developed special applications for forestry, "Hessen-Forst"
has utilized the State of Hesse's centralized SAP software for many
years. Whereas they now only have to access a single
centrally-managed Oracle database, previously this information was
spread out across 94 local Gupta SQLBase databases. A smooth
consolidation of the databases was performed during a fecher
migration project by using Oracle's Virtual Private Database
function. The application "Timber Inventory Entry and Marketing"
had been running decentrally since 1999 in 85 forestry offices in
Hessen, whereby all data was being saved to local Gupta SQLBase
installations. Unfortunately, this situation meant the Forestry
Agency was unable to perform any comprehensive evaluations. To
remedy this, nightly replications were performed via dial-up so
that a copy of the data collected by all of the offices could be
consolidated into and made available from a central Oracle
database. This mechanism was also used to centrally manage master
data which was then distributed to the individual
installations.
In the middle of 2007, a decision was made to replace the
technologically outdated SQLBase installations with direct access
to the existing Oracle database. The decision-makers hoped this
would facilitate faster operational access, enable comprehensive
evaluations and master data administration as well as eliminate the
cumbersome replication process. To implement this project, Hessen
Forst's IT team selected the consulting and software company
fecher, which had already gained a lot of experience from
implementing numerous Gupta migration projects.
Completed in the fall of 2008, the project's results made a
number of the Hessen-Forst IT workers lives easier. Stephan Karger,
Section Head for Processes at Hessen-Forst is convinced that "The
support that was needed over the years really did require
considerable effort. Although this has now been eliminated, all of
the data is still available in real time for the forestry offices
and for evaluation purposes."
