Oregon Department Of Agriculture Ties Together Oracle And FileMaker Systems

Data Integration can be described as the movement of data between two or more coexisting systems. This critical task for business continuity is all too often fulfilled laboriously by IT professionals on a less than optimal schedule using manual import and export procedures.

This predicament is exactly what led the Oregon Department Of Agriculture to SyncDeK. While the department relies heavily on a commercial off-the-shelf system that uses a back-end Oracle database, a custom FileMaker database has been added to fill in the cracks that the commercial system doesn't support.

Problem

Until recently, a time-consuming manual weekly merge was conducted to move source data from Oracle to FileMaker.  Not only did this approach sap IT resources, but it also led to inaccuracies caused by the latency of data refresh into FileMaker.

Solution

A Sync Station was set up to perform data replication between the two systems on an automatic schedule that runs several times a day.  Instead of having to completely rewrite all data from Oracle into the FileMaker database each time, only changes that have occurred in Oracle are inserted and/or updated into FileMaker. Although it was not possible to modify the schema of the Oracle tables to enable querying it directly for new or modified records (which allows for optimal performance) the entire sync process on several hundred thousand source records across multiple tables takes less than 5 minutes.  This is because SyncDeK maintains its own data cache and is quickly able to determine from all records in the Oracle database which ones are new or modified, so only these are sent to FileMaker.

Product: FMS-to-SQL Starter Kit

Proven Benefits

• Reduced IT resource requirements
• Improved data quality and freshness
• Increased value of add-on FileMaker system with up-to-date data