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Housing Authority

Background

Donald Butler works for the City Housing Authority. City Housing Authority is a public housing authority and Donald manages the system that handles all of their data. At any given time, Donald estimated he would have 300 users on their systems all hitting a centralized database for both production and reporting reasons.

Due to the high number of users accessing the central database, Donald started getting reports of poor performance from all directions. The main culprit, he found, was the fact that the same database was being used for applications as well as reporting data.

Requirements

Donald decided that the best way to solve his problem was to split their database into two; one for the applications to work with and one for the users to use for reporting. For this to work the reporting database would have to mirror a subset of the tables used in the first database. He would require a system to do this for him from time to time.

Solution

Since the City Housing Authority uses SQL Server 2005 database servers, Donald first tried SSIS. He found that tool too complicated to use. He then searched and came across Astera.

For Donald, DataMapper was exactly what was needed. Mirroring the correct tables was a snap and in no time found that DataMapper’s ability to insert new record or update an additional record was a pivotal point in choosing Astera.

And because DataMapper was so easy to use, Donald found that he was using it for more than just the problem above. It quickly became an everyday utility and is automating more and more of his data management tasks.