The SABC has enhanced its efficiency, improved productivity and dramatically cut the time taken to extract data from its TV Licence database by implementing Bateleur Software Solutions`Adastrip data extraction utility for Software AG`ADABAS as well as eStrip, an Adastrip extender.
Danie Beukes, project manager of the TV licences project, says: "We needed a solution which would enable us to handle large volumes of records, reduce the time spent on extracting information, and leverage our existing infrastructure. After extensive market research Adastrip and eStrip were chosen on the basis of their clearly superior performance."
The SABC`s TV licence debtors` system is currently growing at a rate of several million records a month. Extracting information from files, which range from 5.5 million debtors` records to 47 million debtor transactions can take days.
"Because Adastrip uses our existing infrastructure and reads the files without using the Adabas technology, it`s amazing what it can do, and eStrip allows us to strip data from a file in which the records are dependent on a previous strip or an external data source," Beukes says. "The software is also very easy to use - our IT staff learnt to use it in a couple of hours."
Examples of the SABC`s achievements with Adastrip and eStrip include:
. Extracting 10 million records from a file of 35 million records and writing them to a flat file with validation rules now takes only 13 minutes. This was done during a normal working day with all our users utilising the system. If done by a Natural program after hours, it would take anything from 10 to 20 hours to complete.
. Reading and extracting 1 million records from the debtors` file, which contains 5.5 million records, now takes 2 minutes.
. A specific monthly report, which previously took 72 hours at month-end, is now completed in 11 hours "Our efficiency has improved because the new software uses considerably fewer resources than an unload of the database, and our productivity has been enhanced as batch processes can be converted to work on Adastrip extracted files instead of database files extracted using Natural programs. This also avoids conflict with online users," Beukes says. "Adastrip is extremely CPU efficient and fast to execute. It doesn`t impact online performance and is able to produce multiple flat files for further processing with one pass of the database," Beukes points out. "Also, as many as 200 files can be stripped in a single invocation of eStrip, and there`s no need to sort the values in the sequential file beforehand - it`s done automatically when they are loaded into the memory table."
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