With a turnover of around £60 million, MCL Group is a dynamic Japanese-owned group of companies. Operating from nine locations within the UK with four hundred and fifty full-time employees, MCL Group’s activities span e-fulfilment & warehousing for a number of well-known high street brands, through its subsidiary, Amethyst Group.
The Challenge
MCL had been using a competitor data replication tool for many years and were looking for a more cost effective tool. They also wanted to find a system that was extensible to cater for future growth and one that provided comprehensive database support for multiple database types.
MCL Group’s trigger for the project was the requirement to upgrade their iSeries machines, which would ultimately lead to incurring costs to upgrade their current data replication software.
MCL Group needed reliable data replication to eliminate the requirement of accessing the iSeries data directly. To support the growing use of the company’s Intranet application, data was replicated to local MS SQL databases to improve response times.
Since MCL Group’s original implementation, DBMoto has been called upon again to fulfil another replication task for another area of the business. The requirement to replicate data to a MS SQL data warehouse from the iSeries was put in place to relieve any potential performance impact from people running reports and interrogating the data directly against the production system. Furthermore, this solution enabled a business view of the data to be created which satisfied the objective to provide information to end-users in an easier and friendlier format.
We went onto HiT Software’s website and downloaded a free evaluation copy.
We then underwent a month’s free trial and tested DBMoto’s replication functionality to see how it worked and whether it would fit into our AS/400 to MS SQL environment.
Jonathan Sweet, Project Manager, had heard of DBMoto from a colleague
MCL Group’s selection criteria included:
Functionality (Ease of use, how data transformations were handled)
Performance impact on iSeries (how Job Logs were accessed)
Price competitiveness
Replication speed and reliability
Technical support
We looked at a total of three solutions. The other two did not meet our criteria whereas DBMoto did. Also, we were very pleased with the support provided by HiT Software and DSCallards throughout the trial. Their technical expertise was excellent
Jonathan Sweet, Project Manager
The Solution
DBMoto – Data Replication and Transformation
MCL Group deployed DBMoto to replicate data from their iSeries Server DB2 to MS SQL Server database. Business applications depend on data from multiple databases and DBMoto is the solution for enterprises that need to move data between database platforms and understands that fast data delivery between relational database platforms yields better performing applications.
DBMoto performs refresh and real-time data replication for enterprise server and desktop replication needs. All major database platforms such as IBM DB2 UDB (including System i5/iSeries/AS400 and zOS), Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase ASE, SQL Anywhere, Cloudscape, MySQL, Informix, Ingres, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, Gupta SQLBase, Firebird and Solid are supported.
The Business Benefit
MCL Group’s system deals with tens of thousands of replications a day and a core problem solved was the speed at which users could perform business tasks against the data. In using DBMoto MCL Group have been able to provide a better reporting experience for users.
The whole process, from evaluation to purchase, was as straightforward as it could have been and we were very pleased with the support we received from both HiT Software and DSCallards.
MCL needed a solution that runs in the background without intervention from us. DBMoto certainly does that. On a day-to-day basis, we just let it run and we know it is going to keep on working. We have found DBMoto is simple to understand and use and we are very happy with the solution in general.
