When William Stucky & Associates (WSA) set out to migrate Bank of America’s loan processing application from Btrieve® to Oracle, they called on Mertech Data Systems’ Btrieve® to Oracle driver to facilitate the migration. What could have been thousands of costly hours of code rewrite and data reformatting was simplified through WSA’s partnership with Mertech.

WSA’s Business Model

Since 1979, William Stucky & Associates (WSA) has provided over 400 prominent banks and commercial finance companies with new and revolutionary software tools for the automation of their business. WSA is the nation's number one supplier of software systems for the Asset-Based Lending industry.

WSA’s Asset-Based Lending Manager (WinABLM) is a state-of-the-art software product designed to monitor and account for revolving loans within a bank or finance company. The system accommodates lenders with portfolios from one million to ten billion dollars of loans outstanding. Multiple users comprised of collateral analysts, loan officers, auditors, and senior management can simultaneously access up-to-the-minute information on any of the PCs within a local area or remote network.

Client Challenges

One of WSA’s clients, Bank of America, was using the WinABLM product for large-scale precious metals loan processing. While the WinABLM software allowed for multi-branch reporting and consolidation, Bank of America was experiencing difficulties in synchronizing the data from six branches to their main New York office. Before Mertech’s solution was implemented, each branch would dump their Btrieve® data, and then upload it to the main office branch, where the data was merged into the main Oracle database. Then the updated data files were sent back to the branch offices the next day.

In an effort to synchronize their database processes, Bank of America made a decision to move from multiple database platforms to a single enterprise-wide platform. Because of the size and scope of their corporate needs, Bank of America chose Oracle.

Companies using or developing applications written around the transactional engines of Btrieve® and Pervasive find that moving their applications to the industry-leading Oracle database engine presents significant challenges. The transactional manner in which Btrieve® works is completely different from the set-based approach that any SQL database such as Oracle employs. There are two obvious migration paths; 1) rewriting entire applications written around the transactional approach to support relational databases such as Oracle, or 2) write a new application from scratch. Both require significant resources and time and may not be feasible for many companies. In WSA’s case, they offer a solution using SQL Server, another industry-leading database engine, but because Bank of America had already invested in Oracle as their corporate standard, WSA approached Mertech for assistance in the migration process.

Mertech’s Value to ISVs

One of the unique challenges that WSA faced was that their client was running a customized version of the WinABLM software. To rewrite the code would involve over 4,000 hours of developer time. With Mertech’s help, WSA was able to accomplish the complex migration. The Mertech database drivers replace the existing Btrieve® dynamic link libraries and effectively intercept and relay application commands to Oracle as optimized, efficient Oracle statements.

“There is no other product out there, besides Mertech’s drivers that would have allowed a complex Btrieve-based application such as WinABLM to work with Oracle without a significant rewrite.” Gandalf Hernandez, Vice President of Product Engineering for Mertech Data Systems.

Visible Results

For several months, Mertech worked closely with WSA’s team of developers to test the transitioning of data through Mertech’s drivers. The thorough testing phases helped to determine any “bugs” that needed to be resolved before the live migration took place.

“The transition and testing phase during the implementation was very smooth,” said Bill Stucky, President of WSA. “Whenever we had a question or ran into a problem the Mertech support people were right there with the answer. Their knowledge and rapid response made our work that much easier.”

Once both WSA and Bank of America were content with the testing phase, the live migration was planned and executed successfully, in a fraction of the time it would take to rewrite the application code.

Through the migration solution WSA and Mertech were able to eliminate Bank of America’s need to manually transmit, upload and resend data. Now that all branches are successfully migrated to Oracle, they are able to move data around automatically, seamlessly, and in real-time.

The ability to migrate Btrieve® applications to robust relational databases such as Oracle results in overall performance improvement, greater scalability and enhanced reporting capabilities while preserving investment in existing applications.