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University of Maryland College Uses Attunity Software to Replicate Data to the AWS Cloud
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) was facing the challenge of organizing and deriving insights from four core datasets, totaling 10 terabytes. These datasets included data related to online student activities, student enrollments, financials, and customer relationship management. The data was stored in a mix of on-premises Oracle and SQL Server databases, Salesforce, and other cloud-based service applications. UMUC’s challenge was to aggregate these disparate data sources, normalize the data, and then load it into a data warehouse for analysis. This was a classic ‘data integration challenge’ that included extracting data from source systems, staging the data in a relational database and applying transformations, loading data into a data warehouse, and running analytics and providing a visualization layer.
About The Customer
University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is an institution that provides quality education at an affordable cost to busy professionals. The majority of their students are adults who are juggling work and families and, often times, military service. Like other providers of higher education, UMUC faces increasing pressure to attract the best students and supply a quality education at the right price. To stay ahead of the curve, colleges and universities must ultimately seek a competitive advantage, constantly identifying opportunities for improvement. To achieve this, UMUC launched a big data strategy on the strengths of Amazon Web Services.
The Solution
UMUC selected Amazon Redshift for its data warehouse, citing its high performance and low cost. To address the data integration challenge, UMUC turned to the AWS Marketplace and chose Attunity for Amazon Redshift. In the past, UMUC was using Oracle Streams to collect data from Oracle Databases and load it into an Operational Data Store (ODS) for transformation using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), before ultimately loading into a data warehouse for analysis. However, some of the data sources are located on Microsoft SQL Server databases and Oracle Streams is not able to load from non-Oracle databases. To work around this challenge, the team at UMUC had to manually extract data from their SQL Server databases and combine it with their Oracle source data–a time-consuming process. UMUC leveraged Attunity software to both speed up their data movement and have a single point of management for all data movement. This gives the University greater visibility and flexibility when they choose to add or remove data sources or targets in the future.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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