Overview

For years, United Rentals struggled to maintain duel replication from the source IBM i system to two Teradata environments. They leveraged a CDC/data replication technology to stream data continuously to both systems, but if there was a network communication issue (no matter how brief) the replication process would crash. This replication failure would result in their production data warehouse process to not build at night and as a result fail to send out critical scorecards to the executive team and branches. It would take hours to understand the failure point, restart the replication, get the data back in synch and perform necessary validations. They also would identify “gaps” in the data where the starting point was set incorrectly and as a result they were missing data

Challenge

Because of the ongoing replication interruptions, the business to lose confidence with the data and processes. There were numerous occasions when replication would fail just before midnight and as a result key metrics and critical scorecards would not get distributed. The other issue they encountered was with the data itself. When recovering from a replication outage there were times when the restart point was slightly off and caused data issues. As a result they had gaps in the data, which the business would find and report back to on and as a result they started questioning the overall validity of the data.

One of the requirements was that the technology architecture NOT change. Their business processes were in place and tested and as long as the real-time data was correct, the architecture was exactly as they wanted.