“We closed the security gap by migrating the four business applications from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and avoided one-time Oracle upgrade costs of $210,000 and $61,000 in Oracle licenses.” Valerie Kohls, Technology Manager, County of San Diego The County of San Diego values a secure, reliable IT infrastructure that helps employees provide efficient services to residents. However, it faced security risks with several business applications running on an unsupported Oracle 8i database. Instead of upgrading to the latest version of Oracle, the county migrated the applications to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, saving money, improving reliability, and ensuring optimal employee productivity. Business Needs As a local government, the County of San Diego values efficiency, innovation, and fiscal discipline in the delivery of services to its residents. The county’s IT department provides cost-effective, reliable, and secure business applications for its employees to work more productively. The IT department maintains more than 400 applications running in a heterogeneous database management system (DBMS) environment that includes the Microsoft SQL Server data management software and Oracle, a situation that requires two different DBMS skill sets. However, due to the cost of upgrading Oracle licenses, some of the county’s applications were running on an older unsupported version of Oracle 8i. These included EASIER, an air emissions inventory application used to calculate toxic emissions of regulated businesses, and the Absence and Overtime Collection application (AOTC) that the county’s auditors and controllers use to process employees’ overtime reports and requests for time off. Another unsupported application, ERMXtender, is used by the Auditor & Controller department to generate reports. “The ERMXtender application was running on both Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 environments, with the majority of users on the SQL Server platform,” says Ernest Solomon, Department IT Coordinator in the Auditor and Controller Department at the County of San Diego. Finally, the third-party EMC ApplicationXtender system, used by the Auditor & Controller and Treasurer-Tax Collector departments for the capture, storage, viewing, and management of documents, also ran on Oracle 8i. These important business applications affect county employees’ productivity. “These applications were running on an unsupported version of Oracle and the company was no longer releasing security updates for it,” says Valerie Kohls, Technology Manager at the County of San Diego. “This opened up an unacceptable security risk for the county and meant that we were not receiving upgrades for new functionality. We could upgrade to the latest version of Oracle, or we could migrate to a different DBMS altogether.” Solution The County of San Diego decided to migrate the applications to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise so they would be running in a fully-supported, highly secure database solution. The county had signed a Microsoft Enterprise agreement in June Customer: County of San Diego Website: www.sdcounty.ca.gov Customer Size: 15,000 Country or Region: United States Industry: Government—Local government Partner: Scalability Experts Customer Profile As a regional government agency, California’s County of San Diego serves the needs of the region's more than 3 million people. It employs more than 15,000 people. Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio − Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Hardware Server: Dell PowerEdge 2950, 6840 Desktop: HP DC7900, Dell Optiplex 620/745, Dell Latitude D630, HP Compaq 7900/8000, HP Elitebook 8440p For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies Microsoft SQL Server Customer Solution Case Study County Solves Security Risks with Database Migration, Saves $280,000 in Upgrade Costs