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Migration on new Oracle DBMS: bitter experience of the Russian bank

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21.06.10, 17:10, Msk
Текст: Anastasia Simakina

Ekaterinburg Uraltransbank presumably because of an error when updating the version of Oracle DBMS faced large-scale system failure. Work of its departments and transactions on cards and also Internet banking was blocked.

One of the largest banks of the Ural Federal District - Uraltransbank - has problems with functioning of IT infrastructure. According to some information, there were difficulties at migration of the database on Oracle Database 11g from the 9th version of DBMS. According to information which was published in blogs, the reason of failure was the fact that in time data backup was not made. As a result at migration the crucial file was lost.

According to some messages, failure led to a stop of all bank departments in Yekaterinburg. Also ATMs did not work. "They say that administrators repeatedly warned the management in writing about risks and effects, but did not receive any reaction", - one of the informed bloggers writes.

The statement in which it is said that on June 14 in bank "short-term technical works" because of what from 00 to 7 o'clock in the morning service of bank cards and accounts in Internet bank was suspended were carried out is posted on the official site of Uraltransbank. The press service of bank confirmed that malfunctions in IT infrastructure took place, however within several days could not answer questions when and for what reason there was a failure and also what it implicated.

The employee of the bank motivated the failure from comments with the fact that corporate e-mail does not work for it, and it cannot perform correspondence neither with internal, nor with external contacts. According to the bank representative, elimination of a problem was expected on Monday.

It is known that earlier Uraltransbank did not stint investments into reliability of own IT infrastructure. So, from 2004 to 2006 the bank together with the Ekaterinburg integrator "Khosta" implemented the project on creation of disaster-proof storage system and data protection. Then in 2008 the Quadrium company implemented in a branch network of bank a system CFT Bank (an object-oriented banking system on the basis of Oracle DBMS).

As the managing partner of Quadrium Sergey Kasparyants, at the moment unclear what specifically applied system glitched commented on TAdviser: banking system, processing or other. "If the reason in the core banking system, it is necessary to address to Center of Financial Technologies (CFT) company as this company is ABS producer set in bank and delivers updates and maintenance", - he said. Quadrium, according to him, does not work with bank now. It was not succeeded receive comments of Khosta and CFT about the event.

The independent experts polled by TAdviser consider that transition from one version of DBMS to another is rather risky procedure which theoretically could end is deplorable for bank at assumption by personnel of a number of errors. So, the assistant department head of DPC of Open Technologies company Sergey Kulikov says that the labor input of this procedure is affected by a number of factors as that quantity of the used options DBMS, the width of functionality of a layer of the database of the application, quantity of the used different types and data segments. The amount of time which can be selected for idle time of a system is also important.

According to Sergey Kulikov, the most serious risks of the procedure of migration are connected with emergence of emergency situations after its end: can incorrectly work or be damaged the given applications using DBMS, and, besides, the new version can appear is not compatible to infrastructure services.

Despite it, the procedure of migration is well fulfilled and documented therefore should not become the reason of failure of all complex of IT systems. "Principal components of the successful project are development and testing of a technique of migration. Before accomplishment of industrial migration a complete inspection at the test stand with the subsequent functional and stress testing of the applied systems for control of correctness of their work on the new version of Oracle should be carried out", - Alexander Hludenev, the director of system solutions of Croc company explains.

Besides, according to the polled experts, Oracle and in version 11g offers the option Real Application Testing which allows as "lose" the loading taken on the old version on the new version and analyze the reasons of degradation of separate plans of requests and record them if it is necessary.