Live Event Company Migrates from Oracle Discoverer to Microsoft SSRS

The company puts everything its users need to meet the event and exhibition marketing goals at their fingertips. Every event, regardless of size or type, requires the need for comprehensive data collection, analysis, and reporting capabilities.

Background

Marketing leaders across the industry are scrutinizing their budgets more than ever. To justify event spending and convey business value, live event marketers are embracing quantitative measures of success.

A leading event marketing services company needed to move off the unsupported Oracle Discoverer platform to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. The company engaged ennVee to help them speed up the migration process, and use our ennSight tool to convert the reports.

With the ennSight-converted reports, the company's Measurement and ennSight team will continue to offer comprehensive data collection, analysis, and reporting capabilities. There is special emphasis on key metrics that tie to business outcomes, with reporting that includes insights and actionable recommendations.

Company Snapshot

• Industry: Business Services, Advertising & Marketing
• Size: 3000+ employees
• Project Location: US, India

Executing the Discoverer to SSRS Migration

ennVee needed to migrate 408 reports from Oracle Discoverer to Microsoft SSRS in two phases. 

Phase 1 — Convert 50 "high" priority Discoverer reports to Microsoft SSRS and deploy to production in three weeks.

Phase 2 — Convert the remaining 358 Discoverer reports to Microsoft SSRS using four-week sprint cycles. This phase included only development and unit testing, whereas QA (Quality Assurance) and UAT (User Acceptance Testing) occurred in the first quarter of 2019.

Discoverer to SSRS Migration Steps

The following steps were taken to complete the migration process.

1. 1 week of prep work for pre-analysis with the client product owner and business SME, followed by a sprint to build foundational components, shake out the environment, and build reusable report objects (standardized filters, header, footer, layouts) to help the team work more efficiently.
2. Set up VPN and VM access, access for DEV and UAT environments in Microsoft SSRS, and access to Oracle data from the SSRS environment.
3. Extract the SQL query from the Oracle Discoverer Desktop version, and work with SQL in an integrated development environment in the Oracle database.
4. Create a new project in Visual Studio adding new or existing reports, import the extracted SQL in Query Designer, and add the operating unit parameter to develop the SSRS report.
5. Deploy the converted reports to the production server, export them to Microsoft Excel, and compare the report with Discoverer Plus.
6. Track the status of each report using the Scrum board in JIRA, and update the Kanban board daily to monitor migration progress.

Benefits of migrating from Discoverer to SSRS

The reports conversion project helped the company continue to create the most meaningful and memorable experiences for marketers, organizers, and event attendees while leveraging additional inherent SSRS reporting capabilities.

With the converted reports, the company is able to speed up business decisions by anticipating problems and support for Oracle production, enhancement projects, and lean initiatives related to Oracle ERP.

Check out our other Discoverer blogs for migration case studies and tips.