Challenges

• Ensure data integrity for the company’s flagship legal research products, which run on a multimaster, multidatabase configuration, to ensure that system users, including attorneys, paralegals, law clerks, and judges, have the most up-to-date and accurate information on legal cases and precedents
• Provide highly available, reliable services to assure user confidence
• Accelerate resynching data between various databases to reduce downtime, ensure a consistent user experience, and avoid revenue loss associated with compromised service levels
• Optimize IT team productivity in managing the numerous databases that support online legal research and other solutions

Solutions

• Deployed Oracle GoldenGate Veridata 11g to help assure that the company’s legal research services, which run in a multimaster database replication environment, deliver a consistent user experience and provide accurate information to the legal professionals who rely on them
• Gained the ability to quickly and automatically identify when data is out of synch without interrupting database availability
• Eliminated the need to run complicated queries and spend significant staff resources to identify affected data—saving weeks of effort in some cases
• Minimized downtime and reduced mean time to recovery when out-of-sync situations occur in the company’s Oracle Database environments
• Facilitated the process of keeping databases online and in-sync, which is critical to ensuring service levels and user trust
• Extended Oracle GoldenGate Veridata’s value by creating a PL/SQL procedure that parses Veridata, out-of-sync XML report files; targets out-of-sync rows; and automatically repairs the source—saving further time and resources
• Eliminated the need to manually copy data from site to site and take down sites for extended periods of time to re-instantiate one site from another, improving system availability, reducing risk of errors, and improving customer satisfaction
• Avoided several hundred hours of downtime over a six-month period, thanks to the extended solution’s advanced synching capabilities that eliminated the need to re-instantiate the databases―which process more than 72 million lines of data nightly
• Leveraged the solution to efficiently detect possible errors and data omissions as the company migrates from third-party databases, including IBM DB2, to Oracle Database 11g, streamlining the process and avoiding potential data loss
• Improved ability to health check databases in production and testing environments before placing them back in service after incident resolution

Why Oracle

“Oracle GoldenGate Veridata offers a powerful tool that enables high-speed, efficient data comparison, which is essential to our ability to ensure accurate, consistent data for our research services. It can support our high-volume environment in which we process more than 72 million rows of data, nightly. The ability to use the product with both Oracle and nonOracle Databases is also a plus and extends its value for our organization,” said Dan Paczosa, lead database engineer, Legal, Technology, Infrastructure and Operations, Thomson Reuters.

Implementation Process

Thomson Reuters conducted rigorous tests and quality checks before rolling out Oracle GoldenGate Veridata to ensure no negative impact on database resources and performance. It then rolled out the solution over a two-week period to its multisite environment. The solution did not need to have Oracle GoldenGate for the synchronization process. The company completed the testing and rollout process in approximately five months and gained immediate value from the solution.

Resources

• Thomson Reuters Discusses Oracle's Big Data Platform 
• Drive Business Value and IT Savings with Oracle Exadata