Customer Case Studies

DPSync also offers materialization (the "initial/full refresh" mode sometimes called Extract-Transform-Load or ETL), as well as "staged propagation", which is batch-run Change Data Capture (CDC) from PLOG archives as has been the hallmark of tRelational/DPS for many years. In addition, DPSync includes all the ADABAS file analysis, RDBMS modeling, generation, and metadata capabilities of tRelational. With DPSync, you get much more than a mere real-time replication engine.

This Real World Series article features Treehouse's implementation of DPSync at The Delaware Division of Revenue (DoR). The DoR has aging mainframe systems storing information about taxpayers in the State of Delaware. Like many organizations, the Division needs faster and easier access to the data that is stored in their legacy mainframe systems.

What are the options? There are millions of lines of code in many programs and systems, all interacting with one another. Putting these systems to death and going through the painful process of redevelopment is not a viable option. DoR chose Treehouse Software's DPSync for real-time replication of their legacy ADABAS data to ORACLE, thus giving extra life to their legacy systems.

What is The Delaware Division of Revenue?

As the primary revenue collector for the State of Delaware, the Division of Revenue's mission is to collect 100% of the taxes and other revenues required by law to be remitted to the state. DoR collects all income tax, gross receipts tax, withholding tax, and business license fees. They also receive tax returns, reconcile them, contact taxpayers when necessary, issue refunds, make assessments, and effect collections. In addition, DoR also participates in voluntary and involuntary compliance measures to see that everyone pays their fair share. The Delaware Division of Revenue is consistently ranked, by Governing Magazine, as one of the top state revenue agencies.

"...with the real-time capabilities of DPSync, up-to-date worklists can easily be generated from ORACLE any time they're required."

Irving Schechtman
Assistant Director of the
Division of Revenue
State of Delaware

To ensure their place at the top of the rankings, DoR is constantly looking for ways to improve access to the information they have, for both internal operations and internet applications. One example of improvement is for the Billing and Collections group. Irving Schechtman, Assistant Director of the Division of Revenue explains: "Currently, for example, our billing and collections people get worklists of accounts to 'handle'. The worklists are based on information which is loaded into ORACLE every night from ADABAS, so first thing in the morning, the lists are accurate. But by midday, when new transactions have come in, or when other workers have handled accounts, the worklists are no longer accurate because the information has been updated. New worklists are too difficult and time consuming to generate on the fly from ADABAS, but with the real-time capabilities of DPSync, up-to-date worklists can easily be generated from ORACLE any time they're required."

Easier Access of Information

DoR looked at other solutions for moving ADABAS data to ORACLE, but it was clear that DPSync was the best option. DoR plans to use DPSync to replicate all critical mainframe ADABAS data in real time to ORACLE. Since DPSync has been placed into production earlier this year, about 13 million rows of data have been loaded into their ORACLE 10g database, with approximately 500,000 adds / updates / or deletes propagated weekly. This represents only about a third of the data that will eventually be replicated.

Other Benefits of Using DPSync

Now that DPSync is keeping the ADABAS data replicated in real-time to ORACLE, Mr. Schechtman said, "We have the ability to do faster matches, build faster responses to customers, and do it with more facile programming tools."

For future projects, Mr. Schechtman said, "We are also working with a system from Attachmate called Verastream Host Integrator, which you can think of as a super screen scraper. It gives the user a GUI presentation of the data which is stored in ADABAS, and provides the navigation between a myriad of mainframe screens to gather and present individual fields on those screens, where the fields may come from different mainframe screens. We can speed this process up by having the data drawn from ORACLE rather than from ADABAS, since the data is totally and exactly replicated. We can then proceed with the screen navigation and possible resulting update to ADABAS files, where those updates will then, almost immediately, be replicated in ORACLE. In this way, we can use DPSync and VHI to give added life to our legacy mainframe systems."