Success Story
Embarcadero ®
Change Manager ™
“Change Manager reduced our HQPM application and
database upgrade project by eight weeks and saved
OrganizatiOn
DBA Consulting
hundreds of thousands of dollars in man hours. ”
– Cristian Speranta, Principle, DBa Consulting inc.
aPPliCatiOn
Retail HQPM Pricing
Application and Database
DBA Consulting is a Los Angeles-based the customizations and integrate them back into
tOOlS
consultancy that specializes primarily in the target system for testing. But the problem
Change Manager Oracle, systems architecture and design, grew in complexity as parallel branches of
VMware virtualization solutions, design and development sprouted out of necessity, and the
CHallengeS implementation, installations and upgrades of consultants were faced with supporting several
• Leapfrog application ERP-based software solutions for Peoplesoft HR, versions of the system at different stages of
upgrade path from v3 to v6 Financials, and CRM systems. development.
• Application was heavily The upgrade team used Change Manager to
CHallenge
customized compare the various database environments to
A large West Coast warehouse grocery store pull out all the salient information for the steps
• Upgrade the underlying required, i.e., new objects, dropped objects,
chain with an annual revenue of $2B needed
Oracle 8i to 10g differences of all relevant database objects and
to upgrade their HQPM pricing application
after acquiring another large grocery chain. then generate the necessary DDL. Generally this
reSultS type of project would take months to identify
The acquired company used a pricing system
• Retain valuable packaged which had been heavily customized and ran on the database changes alone. However, with
application customizations the Oracle database platform. Their production Change Manager, the upgrade team completed
version was 3.x and they had not upgraded their the database portion of this project within a
• Simplified and accelerated
system for many years, but were still actively matter of weeks, not months. Change Manager
database migrations generated approximately 38,000 lines of SQL
using it on a daily basis. They would have to
• Reduced project timeline leapfrog two versions just to get up to date with code required to perform this process saving the
and costs the latest version: 6.x. team hundreds of man hours.
A successful upgrade required retaining the BenefitS
customizations critical to current business
processes and preserve extensive IP and
enhanced Visibility into Customers’
business logic. Plus there was a sense of urgency
existing Data assets
due to the fact that the HQMP vendor had
declared that support was no longer available for Organizations are constantly weighing the
the 3.x version. Adding to the complexity, they benefits of “buy” versus “build” for their
also had to migrate the underlying database CRM, ERP, business intelligence, or accounting
from an earlier version of Oracle to the lastest systems. There are many factors that cause
release: Oracle 10.2g. companies to choose one path over the other.
The powerful deciding factors in favor of “buy”
SOlutiOn is faster time to implementation, and known
upfront costs. And, of course, organizations
In order to maintain performance and availability
know they have the option to customize the
of the legacy system during the upgrade and
packaged application to suit their individual
migration process, DBA Consulting created an
business needs as the company evolves, but
environment that replicated the customized
these customizations can create problems
legacy system and a vanilla version of the new
system, allowing them to strip out and preserve

A Change Manager Success Story
down the road. When the packaged
application relies on an underlying database
infrastructure, there are two important
“...my firm’s expertise and Change Manager
eventualities to consider. First, how to – were able to save my client hundreds of
manage upgrades to the application layer in
the packaged application without disrupting thousands of dollars and reduce the project
customizations. Second, how to preserve
data and schema architecture customizations
when upgrading the underlying DBMS.
timeline by weeks. ”
– Cristian Speranta, Principle, DBa Consulting inc.
Change Manager‘s database comparison,
alter, and synchronization capabilities
enabled DBA Consulting to generate reports
and reconcile differences between the
different versions of the databases, tables, effort. Change Manager generates reliable, COnCluSiOn
schemas, and other database objects. With syntactically-accurate and properly ordered
Change Manager they could easily capture SQL to bring the desired components in This was a complicated upgrade project, and
schema archives and compare any two line with the comparison target. It preserves without a database change management
databases to monitor changes throughout any existing data and structures, regardless tool like Embarcadero Change Manager,
the migration process. Sophisticated object of whether a table must be dropped and it would have been nearly impossible to
mapping features allowed them to filter out recreated; preserves dependent objects, complete this job within the allotted time-
unnecessary objects to further streamline the referential integrity, grants, etc.; and frame and budget due to the overwhelming
synchronization process and accelerate the recompiles any dependent objects. number of database-related changes of
project timeline. the upgrade. To date, the newly upgraded
reduced Project timeline and Costs HQPM application has been working
in production for over a year with zero
Simplified and accelerated
The total savings realized by the database changes or fixes required after
Database Migrations
warehouse grocery chain was significant. the go-live date.
DBA Consulting had to create literally “The application vendors had quoted my
thousands of DDL alter scripts. Normally client somewhere in the neighborhood of
this would be a time consuming process, $1,000,000 to upgrade their application from
but a database change management tool version 3.x to 6.x,” said Cristian Speranta,
simplifies and automates the process. Principle at DBA Consulting Inc. “It is not
Change Manager offers the ability to an exaggeration to say that together –
generate an alter script to implement the my firm’s expertise and Change Manager –
change, saving a great deal of manual we were able to save my client hundreds of
thousands of dollars and reduce the project
timeline by weeks.
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