The MCS Group, Inc. provides outsourcing solutions for record retrieval, document support, facilities management, and correspondence management. Since 1979, MCS has grown to become the recognized leader in outsourcing solutions to law firms, insurance companies, corporations and government agencies. With offices around the U.S., MCS works to assist their customers in making staff support costs as simple, efficient and economical as possible.
To compete in the aggressive outsourcing market, MCS must constantly look to simplify and streamline their services to provide the most efficient and economical services available to their customers, without sacrificing data integrity or information security.
CLIENT CHALLENGES
The way information is stored and accessed is a critical factor that allows MCS to offer the best service possible to their clients. A strong flexible database is a must. As their service offerings had grown, and their customer list multiplied, MCS found itself with multiple ISAM databases, and a Btrieve-based application that made it difficult to adopt industry standard tools. After 25 years in business, MCS realized that they needed a robust and scalable, enterprise-level database.
Because of the way their databases were created, consolidation would be a huge task. And with over one million lines of code, a rewrite of the Btreive application would not be cost effective. That’s when MCS called Mertech. In an effort to synchronize the databases, and to move to a single enterprise-wide platform that would serve their current needs and support expansion, MCS chose MS SQL Server.
The challenge for MCS was to move their database to a more robust platform while maintaining its investment in its existing enterprise system developed with Btrieve, and all without sacrificing on performance. Moving to SQL was a logical choice, but first, the application had to be manipulated before a migration could take place.
MERTECH’S VALUE TO THE MCS GROUP
When MCS approached Mertech, it was due to to the fact that within their Btrieve database architecture, they lacked Data Dictionary Files (DDFs.) A set of DDFs effectively documents a Btrieve database. Btrieve does not know the entire layout of the files it accesses; only the parts of the record that must be indexed are known to Btrieve.
Initially, Mertech consulted with MCS’s development team, and developed an application to automatically generate the DDFs needed to migrate the databases to MS SQL Server.
“We developed the application to automatically generate the DDFs from MCS’s source code. This was an extremely important step that allowed MCS to ensure their database was in synch with their application.” said Gandalf Hernandez, Vice President of Product Engineering for Mertech Data Systems.
“The main problem we see with Btrieve customers during the migration process is that they do not have these DDFs, or that they are not accurate. There is no other product out there, besides Mertech’s drivers that would have allowed a complex Btrieve-based application such as MCS had built to work with MS SQL Server without a significant rewrite.” Continued Gandalf.
The Mertech database drivers replace the existing Btrieve dynamic link libraries and effectively intercept and relay application commands to MS SQL Server as optimized, efficient SQL statements.
With Mertech’s approach, developers can continue to support Btrieve-based applications and still have flexibility to offer solutions for multiple databases, including relational databases like MS SQL Server and Oracle.
IMPACT ON BUSINESS
Mertech offered a quick migration that was virtually seamless to the end user. Throughout the migration process, Mertech offered continual support to ensure that MCS’s customers would not be negatively impacted by the migration. MCS is now running their database with the industry-leading MS SQL Server.
“We have developed a technology that allows our customers to preserve their investment in their existing database application while allowing them to move to a new database platform without performance degradation.” says Riaz Merchant, President of Mertech Data Systems.
VISIBLE RESULTS
With an application as large as what MCS had been using, a rewrite would have been an expensive undertaking. There are immediate cost savings in using Mertech’s plug-in middleware drivers to access MS SQL. MCS was able to retain their investment in their existing application, avoid a costly code rewrite, and run their application against the MS SQL Server database immediately, without impacting their business.
In addition to a quick migration, Mertech’s high-performance drivers create translated functions optimized to work as effectively as possible. In the outsourced staff support marketplace, where rapid access to information is critical, Mertech ensured a successful move to MS SQL Server with zero down time.
Mertech: Mar 29, 2024 8:53:00 AM
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