South African Revenue Services (SARS) has freed up programming resources, boosted productivity and optimised its budget by installing tRelational and DPS, the Adabas-to-RDBMS data transfer solution from Bateleur Software Solutions.
Isaac Tau, Data Warehouse Manager of SARS, says: "We needed a tool to extract data from our Adabas database and load it into our DB2 data warehouse. Most of our business systems are run from the Adabas database, but the majority of the tools available don`t have the functionality to extract the data."
SARS` data warehouse is enterprise-wide and supports the entire operation. It contains data for all eight of the separate systems administered by SARS, including the Income Tax System (ITS), PAYE, VAT, Customs (Import and Export), and UIF.
According to Tau, tRelational was the only solution capable of meeting SARS` requirements. "After following the proof of concept and tender process, we found tRelational and DPS (Data Propagation System) was the only solution for transferring legacy Adabas data into an RDBMS-based data warehouse," he says.
Bateleur Software Solutions is the official South African distributor for Treehouse Software, the US-based developer of tRelational and DPS. Bateleur is responsible for implementing and supporting the solution for SARS.
The solution works by automatically generating complete RDBMS schema from existing Adabas files and allowing easy mapping of Adabas fields to an existing data warehouse. After tRelational does the mapping, DPS loads and propagates the Adabas data into the RDBMS - without requiring direct access to Adabas.
"The advantages are significant," Tau points out. "Previously, we had to write Natural code to extract data from Adabas into a flat file. Using that method, an extract on 40 million records would take four to seven hours. With tRelational, it takes less than two hours.
"We have saved an enormous amount of time, which is critical in the data warehouse environment. We`ve also enhanced productivity and freed up our programmers for other more strategic assignments. Although the cost saving has not been calculated, we are achieving more on the same budget."
In addition, SARS` efficiency has improved. Previously, all the database tables had to be reloaded every month, whereas the new system requires only changed tables to be loaded. Tau`s team is able to supply data to the users more efficiently, as the data is loaded nightly.
"We are getting closer to a real-time environment. Instead of a one-month delay for delivering data, we are down to 24 hours," Tau says.
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