Powerhouse Integrations – Building Actian Integrations that work, so you don't have to!
By David Byrd
Recently I wrote an article that was entitled, “
Why Actian DataConnect Goes Head to Head with the Big Boys”.
I thought it might be beneficial to show a use-case for why this is
important. But first my background. I was actually a customer of the
original product when it was called Data Junction back in 1993 at
Certified Vacations, and then in 1998 at Putnam Investments. The product
did the job it was purchased for.
Then in 2003, I actually went to work for Data Junction when I
moved back to Texas. Nine months later the company was purchased by
Pervasive where I worked for another three years. Since then I have
worked at many of their clients including QuickArrow/Netsuite, Toyota,
ADP Total Source, Leprechaun, Deltek, Firstcare, Keta Group, Adaptive
Planning (now Adaptive Insights) and finally SFCG. In the meantime, the
company has been acquired yet again by another company called Actian.
As a developer and data integrator, there are many concepts that are
important when designing a product. Some of these are Repeatable,
Scalable, Stability, Reliability, Usability, and more. I have two great
examples where Data Connect meets this mark.
The first was a project I started at Deltek for a client company
called Keta Group. I built at first about 7 integrations that received
that fed into Deltek Costpoint, or pulled data out of Costpoint and sent
it outbound to a company using Maximus. Ultimately the requirements
were reigned in, and it was decided to use five of the integrations I
built. These were implemented in October 2008 and tweaked the next three
months, and then very minors changes have been made since then. The
great thing about these integrations is that they have been running
consistently and
reliably
for over 6 years without any maintenance for Keta to require me ( or
someone trained like me) to support them for that period. This speaks
highly for the product in
Stability.
Ralph Huybrechts, CFO of the Keta Group, LLC, had this to say, "
We
contracted with Deltek, the software supplier, who assigned David Byrd
to write several Pervasive integrations between the prime and
subcontractor’s accounting and timekeeping software and Maximo. David
wrote, tested and finalized these integrations in a 45 day phase-in
period prior to the start of our large base operations support contract
with the Army. This contract requires 350 employees and handles 5,000
service orders per month. The integrations have performed flawlessly
since the start of the contract in 2010. "
The second example I recently spoke about in another article called “
Web-Services Best Practice: Using parallel queueing to streamline web-service data loads”
and how it is important. When I was working at Firstcare I designed an
integration that would run Accumulator Webservices messages, as well as
others, that were stored in a database table. These messages were
created by multiple integrations and fed into the table. Here is the
cool part – a single integration picks up these different types of
messages and then sets the connection parameters on the fly from data
stored in the table with the message like the URL endpoint, the user
& password credentials and seamlessly processes the web service call
and stores the response in the table for later processing. That is
this integration connects to multiple Web-Service endpoints without
hardcoding the required parameters in the integration. This speaks
highly for the product in
Scalability. In fact,
Sandeep Kangala, former EDI Consultant at Firstcare, validated this process is still in effect for Accumulators and running without issue.
But it goes further, the same design concept was taken a step further
at SFCG using Oracle CX endpoints. We initially built a similar
integration to load Oracle Sales Cloud from data provided from exports
from CRM on Demand. However, even with this, we ran into some issues
with CRM On Demand Attachments, especially large ones. The bulk export
out of CRM OnDemand provide all the small file attachments, but not the
large ones. It did though provide their Attachment ID, so we fed these
ids into the database via CRM Attachment Export requests in bulk, and
each attachment was stored in the database response. So in the case not
only was data fed into a web service for loading but also to fetch data
out of a web service, all through this single integration. The best part
of this is that the integration does not care where the XML Message
came from or is going to, it just takes the message, connects, and
sends it, and then stores the response. This is the height of
Repeatability.
Chris Fuller-Wigg, Director of Sales Automated Services, stated, "
The
efficiency gains we experienced when loading data in parallel is kind
of unreal, almost 10x faster than serial. We found ourselves losing a
whole day for Accounts to load, only to push the button to load Contacts
the following day. Cutting out the wait time and letting the system
process multiple loads at once allows us to load data 1.5 weeks earlier
on average."
Lawrence Chan, Sr Sales Automated Services Consultant, added, "
The
value of this solution is not only limited to the incredible
improvements in data migration speed. With one click, we can have your
system's data up to date the day before go live with one click of a
button. With proper planning in place, those late nights getting your
data up to date will be a thing of the past."
The fact the Actian DataConnect can be found to fulfill the meaning of
these terms satisfies the ultimate customer experience. The customer
here is two-fold, the first is the developer being able to define and
build a trusted flexible integration, and the end-customer getting the
data to work the way they want it. This is a win for Actian, a Win for
the Developer and a win for the End-Customer.
Web-Services Best Practice: Using Parallel queueing to streamline Web-service data loads
