Liberty Properties, a member of the Liberty Group, has been using a range of Embarcadero database management, development and performance optimisation software tools that have allowed the company to save money, improve performance and deliver the functionality that users require to remain ahead in a well established market.
Five years ago Liberty Properties bought Embarcadero RapidSQL, DBArtisan and ER/Studio and has continually upgraded the products as part of its annual licence fee. The environment today consists of around 70 Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 11.5 and 12.0 databases with over 5 000 tables taking up 20GB of space on the HP servers.
"With almost 70 databases management is a very key issue for us, as is development," says Maggie Fikkert, IT department head at Liberty Properties. "With that many tables and an average of three procedures per table RapidSQL is critical to speeding up development because of an extremely fast-changing database environment."
Liberty Properties leases, manages and administers 102 retail, office and industrial buildings countrywide, including flagship shopping centres such as Sandton City and Eastgate in Gauteng, and Greenacres in Port Elizabeth.
Liberty Properties is firmly entrenched and competitive in its markets and the primary support role of IT is to maintain systems, ensure the optimal performance thereof and deliver new functionality to users as and where it could further improve business performance.
The IT systems are used and integrated in all support structures within the company. Fikkert says a major challenge is to maintain the high-quality products and in so doing render a high-quality service to property tenants, adding to their satisfaction.
"Our properties must not only look good to retain our customers and get people moving through the centres, but the smooth functioning of the IT systems we have in place is critical to the successful day-to-day operation of our organisation," she says.
"When we do migrations from database test systems to production systems we are delighted to see the immediate benefits of automated products being passed onto the business, such as time-savings and fewer required IT skills."
Liberty Properties is using DBArtisan to maximise availability, performance and security of databases, RapidSQL to improve programmer productivity and code quality, and ER/Studio, for multi-level data modelling.
DBArtisan helps administrators in large environments across a variety of platforms, technologies and processes, across geographic boundaries and business units. RapidSQL speeds up development and improves code quality through extensive code templates, and the graphical browsing capabilities allow administrators to understand the structure and dependencies of database objects. ER/Studio produces blueprints of databases and data warehouses that foster team collaboration and automatically enforce sound database design principles as designers model.
Alan Raubenheimer, CEO of Embarcadero Africa, says: "These tools save Liberty Properties time and money and improve the efficiency of its database operation - on which the business relies - by providing fast development at a consistent standard in a complex environment."
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