by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development and Cloud Alliance Leader at Treehouse Software, Inc.
This blog focuses on a current Treehouse Software customer – a major airline that is a long-time user of Software AG’s Adabas database on their mainframe system.
Business Background
This U.S. based airline is one of the largest domestic air carriers, and during peak travel seasons, they operate thousands of weekday departures within a network of hundreds of destinations in the United States and several other countries.
Business Issue
The airline’s IT modernization team was looking for a technology solution that enabled them to move their Adabas data off of the mainframe to more modern applications. However, their mainframe contains vital airline maintenance and parts data that must always be highly available, so rather than performing a complete migration from the mainframe, Treehouse technical representatives and the customer decided to utilize a data warehouse and real-time mainframe data replication. This architecture allows the mainframe legacy teams to maintain existing critical applications, while the modernization team develops applications on the newly created Oracle-based RDBMS. All teams at the airline determined that tcVISION real-time mainframe data replication was the perfect fit for meeting their goals.
The airline requires that tcVISION must support online and batch Adabas transactions and provide data replication between Adabas and their new Oracle RDBMS. Additionally, their large databases contain millions of rows (> 50 million) that must be supported, as well as support for database change audit requirements (datetime and type of operation), transaction management, and notification of exception events. There must also be support for configuration management between development, QA, and production.
The tcVISION Technology Solution...
The following is a high-level view of the airline customer’s tcVISION data replication architecture:
- Adabas: Mainframe data source containing business critical information replicated to the RDBMS.
- Oracle: Open Platform RDBMS chosen by customer as replication target for both data warehouse and modernization project. The tcVISION Manager also uses Oracle as a repository for the metadata (field mappings).
- tcVISION Manager: Software component deployed on both source and target systems. It is responsible for provisioning resources for:
- Processing scripts
- Metadata import
- Scheduling
- tcSCRIPT: Software component deployed on both source and target systems. It works in conjunction with the tcVISION Manager to:
- Perform initial load of Adabas into Oracle
- Ongoing near realtime CDC (Change Data Capture) and replication from Adabas to Oracle
- tcSCRIPT processes data from:
- Direct from the DBMS (initial load) or from DBMS extracts
- Adabas Protection log (PLOG)
- tcVISION Control Board: Software component deployed on a Windows machine which provides graphical user interface for a single point of control to administer the tcVISION environment:
- Metadata import, creates metadata rules governing relationship between mainframe and open platform data structures
- Replication rule maintenance
- DDL creation
- Creation of ETL and replication processes
- Start, stop, and schedule replication processes
Customer Outcomes
All requirements were met by tcVISION, which led to a successful project implementation. Here is a look at the customer’s reported outcomes and benefits:
| Business Outcome | Customer Benefit |
| Data warehouse is always in sync with Adabas using tcVISION data replication | Improved timeliness and reliability of reporting data |
| Reduced usage of mainframe MIPS | Reduced cost |
| All data required for modernization project was successfully replicated to target environment | Increased business efficiently and agility |
Contact Treehouse Software for a Demo Today…
No matter where you want your mainframe data to go – the cloud, open systems, or any LUW target – tcVISION from Treehouse Software is your answer.
Just fill out the Treehouse Software Product Demonstration Request Form and a Treehouse representative will contact you to set up a time for your online tcVISION demonstration.
Further reading:
Many more mainframe data migration and replication customer case studies can be read on the Treehouse Software Website.
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