Bayer Crop Science – Oracle Database Appliance

The Computational Life Science (CLS) team of Bayer Crop Science is responsible for the implementation, integration and maintenance of applications and databases. The goal of the CLS team is to boost R&D productivity by turning scientific data into assets.

One of the projects at CLS is phasing out the Sybase DB. Therefor data needs to be replicated from Sybase to Oracle, this is because some old legacy systems are still using Sybase as backend DB. The Oracle database is primarily used for storing experiment data, crop metadata and shipment metadata. This database needs to be available 24/7 as scientists over the entire world use it for reporting and experiment validation purposes.

All authorized employees should be able to consult the scientific information in the databases at any given time. Response time and accessibility are the key performance parameters.

A short history

2011:

• A part of the databases of Bayer Crop Science Belgium are running on Oracle Solaris Cluster Systems.
• Because the Solaris Cluster Systems are underused, Exitas allocates some additional databases to Solaris Clusters.

2013:

• The existing hardware of the Solaris Clusters System is too expensive and the setup rather complex. Assuring in-house expertise of this platform has become inefficient and unjustifiable cost wise.
• Exitas recommends a migration to a new platform that will be cheaper, simpler and easier to maintain.
• Exitas performs a full database migration to Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) X3-2.
• Bayer Crop Science benefits from increased power and memory space, a shorter response time and reduced deployment and maintenance costs.

Today:

Full database administration (DBA):

• Maintenance and performance tuning for:
  • Oracle GoldenGate for the synchronization of Sybase and Oracle.
  • System Database
  • Active standby databases
• ODA updates for firmware, operating system (OS), grid, ORACLE RDBMS (Relational Database Management System)
• Database application support

Solutions

For more than 10 years Exitas has been the preferred partner and supplier of Oracle products and related services for Bayer Crop Science Belgium. During this period Exitas was and still is responsible for:

• The transfer of the existing plants and seeds database to Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) x3.2.
• The optimization of the data load performance and the backup procedure:
  • Data loads: from more than 1 week to less than 1 hour
  • Backup running time: 6 times faster
• The maintenance and the continued monitoring of the Oracle databases system.

This includes: deploying all database instances, scaling them, recovering them if they fail, taking backups, upgrading them to newer versions and the screening of slow running queries or suboptimal configuration parameters.