Coca-Cola at IOD 2011: Migrating from Oracle Database to IBM DB2

Tom DeJuneas, Systems Manager at Coca-Cola Bottling, joined the IBM Break Free forum at Information-on-Demand 2011 to discuss migrating from Oracle Database to IBM DB2. (Hear more from Tom in Part 2: Patching/Compression Oracle Database vs. IBM DB2 and Part 3: Autonomic Computing Features of DB2“

Transcript of Video

00:28:26 TOM:  About three and a half years ago we were looking at doing a SAP upgrade from 4.7 Enterprise VCC 6.0.  And it was going to make us upgrade our Oracle database.  We were looking at adding additional databases for more landscapes, and looking at a couple other SAP modules.

00:28:47 And during that process I discovered that the Coca-Cola Company had negotiated some DB2 licenses with the SAP product.  And I looked at it, and when I first looked at it I couldn’t get over the dollar savings.   And we had zero DB2 experience in house.  Went in, talked to my lead DBA basis guy and told him, I said, look man, I found some news.  I said we’re going to have to migrate, I think, from Oracle to DB2 and he fell off his chair.  I picked him back up and I asked him, I said what do you know about DB2?  He says well, I can spell it.

00:29:20 And I said look, I said, I’ve run the numbers.  I said we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of savings here.  And I said, you know, we’ve got to look at this.  And this was December.  And by April 15th, we had our whole R3 landscape migrated with a Unicode conversion.
00:29:38 So we decided, you know, we probably are one of the customers IBM likes.  We didn’t ask you guys to come in and prove it to us.  We just migrated from HP-UX to AIX the year before and used the same R3 load utilities to migrate the database from Oracle to Oracle on the same platform, so knew exactly what we’re going to be doing.

00:29:57 We had no issues migrating from HP to the AIX platform.  We went to a two-day DB2 for Oracle DBAs.  Came back, let my lead DBA play with it.  He said yeah, it looks good, and, you know, we ended up doing it and sent him off.  He got certified to do all these DB migrations and we did 20-something platforms ourselves.  And within a year we had our whole SAP landscape migrated from Oracle to DB2.

00:30:26 At the time he was DBA with 12 years of Oracle and SAP.  At this point he would not go back.

00:30:34 BARRETT:  Wow.  So he went from dropping on the floor to a convert.

00:30:39 TOM:  He is definitely a believer.

00:30:42 BARRETT:  All right.

00:30:42 TOM:  His phone rings a lot less and I’m getting a lot more productivity out of him spending time doing SAP performance tuning with some poor code than he spends a lot less time doing DBA work right now.