- Customer: Mortgage Loan Servicer
- Industry: Financial Services
- Challenge: Move BAW platform from Oracle to MS SQL Server and migrate existing workload
- Solution: IBM BAW Instance Migration
- Outcome: 170,000 process instances migrated to new infrastructure enabling license cost savings
A mortgage servicing company wanted to move their BAW database from Oracle to SQL Server to decrease their license costs. They had initially tried to manually move the existing production data to the new database, but ran into several challenges. Because there are subtle differences in BAW data structures for different database vendors, there are no database to database migration tools that can safely guarantee the movement of BAW data from one database environment to another. At the same time, the customer would be moving from BAW 8.5.6 to BAW 20.0.0.1.
The company contacted IBM for assistance but they did not have any off the shelf tools available to support this migration. Knowing our long history of working with them on large, complicated BAW projects, IBM reached out to Apex Process Consultants to see if we could help. There was a deadline of a license renewal date looming, and so Apex started work with the customer team to establish the requirements for the migration. The team soon determined that the best approach would be to move the Process Instances by reading and writing them at the application level. All they had to was develop an application that could do this without modifying or missing any tasks, data or historical information.
The Instance Migration tool utilizes published APIs to update Process, Task and Business data to duplicate the original instance without the need for any direct database updates.
The Apex team worked with the customer team to create a Process Instance migration tool that reads Process Instance data from a legacy environment and re-creates the legacy Process Instance in a new target environment. The Instance Migration tool utilizes published APIs to update Process, Task and Business data to duplicate the original instance without the need for any direct database updates. After each Process Instance is migrated to the target environment, the legacy Process Instance is suspended so that the “master” for each Process Instance is only accessible in one environment, but the legacy Process Instance is still available for reference if there are any questions or an issue arises.
A short POC demonstrated that the Instance Migration tool worked, and could be relied on to achieve the goals of the project. It also provided some baseline performance data for the migration tool. A series of minor enhancements to improve the overall efficiency of the migration process followed.
As part of the new Process Instance creation in the target environment, some external system of record databases required updates of data directly related to the process details. Specific external database updates were added as customization to the Instance Migration tool to update the external databases during the completion of the migration of a specific Process Instance. This one by one processing guaranteed that only successfully migrated Process Instances enabled the updates of the external databases, thereby creating a “no rollback required” level of success.
To be completely sure of what had been accomplished when running the Instance Migration tool, the team implemented reporting that provides a clear mapping of Legacy Process Instance and related Tasks to the new Process Instance and related Tasks. This provides a clear picture of what was completed and outputs any issues that may have been found with a particular Process Instance. The tool was set up to support individual or groups of Process Instances to be migrated so the client could process the migration in “lifts” that correlated to planned outages and also target specific Process Applications and Processes.
To complete the migration to the new SQL Server database, a plan was implemented that allowed for some Process Instance drain-out in the legacy environment, for short running Processes, and direct Process Instance migration to the target environment for longer running Processes. In this way, the client was able to successfully migrate approximately 170K Process Instances in a controlled manner that met their project timing goals, allowing them to complete their database transition.
Process Instance migration can be an effective strategy for specific BAW migration use cases, especially:
- Migration between significantly older and newer versions (where no DB upgrade script is available)
- Migration to a new underlying database vendor
- Migration from on-premises to SaaS
To learn more about BAW Instance Migration, contact us.
