For the past two years, Mobil Oil Corporation has been engaged in a worldwide effort to standardize hardware and software platforms. Mobil Producing Nigeria has used an enterprise resource management system written in DataFlex since 1988. This system provides multi-warehouse inventory management, project management, purchasing, work order processing, electronic document approval and a myriad of management reports.

Evaluation

After extensive research, Mobil found the most cost effective method of standardizing this mission critical application was not to replace it, but rather to migrate the DataFlex data to a Mobil standard Oracle server. Independent contractors Chuck Atkinson and Bob Laubenberg have been involved with this application since 1993 and their recommendation was to use Mertech Data's ORAFlex product to act as the conduit between the existing DataFlex program library and the Oracle server.

Implementation

The conversion to Oracle was originally scheduled for the first quarter of 1999. However, due to the remoteness of the Mobil site, and the accompanying difficulties in acquiring a disk upgrade for the Sun server, the project was delayed by several months. During this time Mobil did not remain idle. The Flex2SQL module was tested and re-tested while the conversion procedures were being validated. The Mertech software performed flawlessly through four successive "mock" conversions. On Saturday August 28th, over 3 million records from 152 DataFlex files were moved to the Oracle server. Once again the conversion went without a hitch, and on Monday August 30th Mobil was live on Oracle. The Mertech OraFlex driver performed as advertised allowing Mobil to run its existing DataFlex programs against the Oracle server with no code changes. As an added bonus several of the database query programs were modified to pass SQL statements to the server via the Mertech driver. This resulted in a tenfold increase in speed in several key database queries.
"Throughout Mobil's testing and database conversion Mertech provided exemplary support. Their responses to questions and requests for additional information were prompt and concise. It is not always easy to obtain timely support from a vendor that is half a world away, but Me