Summary
PeaceHealth is a not-for-profit health care system in the U.S. Read how the company worked with ExistBI for Informatica PowerCenter consulting, administration and upgrade support services.
About PeaceHealth
PeaceHealth is a not-for-profit health care system based in Vancouver, Washington, USA that serves communities in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. It provides a wide range of medical services, including hospitals, medical clinics, laboratories, and other health care facilities.
Challenge
PeaceHealth needed an experienced consultant to help them upgrade their Informatica PowerCenter to version 10 of the application. Due to major changes in the underlaying architecture and repository, the upgrade process needed to be executed as multiple upgrades. The company needed an experienced provider who could methodically manage each upgrade step and potential issues. ExistBI was chosen to carefully manage and deliver the process.
Solution
As part of its proposal, ExistBI provided a detailed roadmap of what would be required to migrate PeaceHealth to version 10 of Informatica PowerCenter. It included extensive details on project goals, pre-requisites, migration process, and upgrade testing strategies. This provided PeaceHealth with a full view of what to expect prior to ExistBI undertaking the project.
Upgrade testing strategies
During the upgrade of any offering of software, the testing phase is just as important as the upgrade of the software code. The new environment must be certified for operation, for accuracy in data and for performance compared to the previous environment.
Typically, there four different types of testing that may occur with an upgrade of data integration software: Operability, Same Data, Application Security and Application Performance. Depending on the sophistication of the enterprise an upgrade may incorporate testing from each category to fully certify an environment. During the planning phase these categories should be kept in mind and specific metrics or requirements established.
Operability
Operability is defined as having the ability of being put into use, operation or practice. This class of tests is conducted to determine if the Informatica applications are running and executing without any abnormality or failures at start-up and day-to-day operations. These are commonly referred to as smoke tests and are usually conducted during or right after the upgrade process is complete.
Same Data
Same data defines a state where the new environment processes the data and provides the data in the same state / format as the legacy environment. This can be the most time-consuming process in the project plan due to the time involved for setup, execution and review. There are various methods for same data testing each having their own set of pros and cons. They are full regression, partial regression and automated testing.
Application Security
Application security relates to security that is both internal and external. External security is tested to confirm if outside threats or exposure exist and examples include SQL injection testing, SSL encryption levels, database permissions testing and open ports testing.
Internal security audits the internal application to confirm users have access to only those areas they need to conduct business. It includes items like administrator and admin user password strength and default tests, folder access and permissions for users, connection access and permissions for users and tool access and permissions for users.
Application Performance
Application performance testing measures metrics in multiple areas. This can be conducted through both scientific and non-scientific approaches. Categories for performance testing include client Performance – responsiveness of the client tools, integration service performance – ETL workflow performance, server performance and network performance.
Expertise Offered
ExistBI offered the following expertise to help PeaceHealth meet its objectives:
Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration and ETL tool used to extract data from various sources, transform it according to business rules, and load it into a target data warehouse or data repository for analysis and reporting. It is widely used to efficiently manage and process data.
ETL development including a strong understanding of data structures, data modeling, and databases. ExistBI is also proficient in working with various data formats and sources, understanding data quality issues, and ensuring data accuracy during the extraction and transformation process. In addition to Informatica, ExistBI is well versed in working with ETL tools like Microsoft SSIS, Talend, IBM InfoSphere DataStage and SAP Data Services.
Results
ExistBI was able to successfully complete the upgrade for PeaceHealth.
“ExistBI helped us with a Data Warehouse update by providing Informatica support. Our organization was very pleased with the teams level of Informatica expertise, we hired them for a complex v8.6 to v10.1 Informatica upgrade/migration project. A highly recommended Informatica Partner” – Barbara Mack, Data Warehouse Supervisor
Do you need the expertise from a proven and experienced ETL consultant who can help you reliably move your data? Let ExistBI be your ETL partner.
