Dare to Explore the Possibilities

The client understands the outcome they are seeking, but they don’t always have full visibility into the best technical paths for achieving those outcomes.  Sometimes you have to look beyond the task list to identify better alternatives

The System

An identity management technology company had just extended its contract with a state Department of Transportation, to maintain the state's driver license infrastructure for an additional 6-months, even as a new vendor was preparing to assume the role.  The extension was actually a gesture of goodwill on the company’s part, as they were in the process of strategically exiting that line of business.

The system was comprised of hundreds of stand-alone stations that communicated to servers running the DB/2 database management system.

The Challenge

Given the daily statistics relating to usage, the driver's license database was projected to exhaust its storage capacity approximately two months before the maintenance contract was due to expire — and the contractual penalties for a capacity failure would have been severe.

The internal proposal to fix it called for schema modifications involving four developers, a tester, and SafeCode's consultant as project manager — an estimated six weeks of work. The consultant arrived on-site as the first team member, ready to build a detailed project plan. Within two days, he had found a better answer.

The Approach

The DBMS had a data-striping feature that had never been enabled. This would normally be considered a performance feature, but this database was approaching a hard file-size limit imposed by the operating environment — a constraint that striping would eliminate by distributing the data across multiple files, effectively raising the ceiling on capacity.  Activating it would extend the database's effective capacity well past the end of the contract — no schema modifications, no additional development staff, and substantially lower implementation risk than what had been proposed.

He brought the alternative to the client. The reaction was, in his words, joyous. They backed up the database to an offline server, enabled the feature in a test environment, and turned the tester loose on it. Everything checked out.

Backups were done on the production database after hours.  The enhancement was applied and checked out remotely.  The state’s DMV was open for business without any interruptions on the following business day.

The Outcome

The project was completed in approximately ten days. The database now had enough additional capacity for more than a year of additional operation, if needed. The client gained goodwill with the state agency and was grateful for the greatly reduced cost as well as the near-zero risk exposure.