Challenge Overview
Topcoder has a new customer that is an industry leader in the rewards and coupons and they would like to solicit your help migrating their data and making it easier for them to run challenges on the Topcoder Platform
Currently they have a 15 year old platform backed by Informix and they have a couple of power users that have direct access to Informix to run a few critical weekly reports. Sometimes these queries lock the tables and when the tables are locked it can crash the platform. There are around 1000 tables and multiple layers of view on top of these tables. All the types of things you would expect on a dbms that has grown organically over the last 15 year.
The customer wants to move off Informix onto a more modern cloud based platform and we are looking for the best technique to do that. In the short term we want to replicate the data into a system like amazon’s RedShift and point our power users to do their reporting off that system, but we need some help in determining the best way to do that. Not only replicate the data the first time but also keep the Informix and the new system in sync (daily would be fine). Here is a list of Informix migration utilites: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSGU8G_12.1.0/com.ibm.mig.doc/ids_mig_246.htm and we are looking to get the following questions solved.
1. Which tool would we use for the first time data export of the entire schema in Informix? How would we use it that would not lock the tables or impacting any of application queries?.
2. What would a data synchronization strategy look like from an export perspective if we assume daily as the most aggressive snapshot that we would require? How could you run this without locking tables or impacting any of application queries?
In summary we are looking for the best way to do a full data dump one time, without impacting the current system. In addition we are looking for the best approach to keep this new “exported” data up to date within a daily resolution.
We are looking for a tactical solution as much as we are a strategic one, so if you have particular product or software recommendations we would love to hear them. This is an exploratory challenge and unlike most code challenges will be completely subjective and the solutions will be ranked against each other via the innovation scorecard
Final Submission Guidelines
Your submission should be a single document (word, markdown or pdf are all acceptable) If you would like to include some code or script samples you may include them in the document or attach them in a zip file. No video is required but please be as complete as possible. Assume your audience has a deep understanding of database but has limited exposure to Informix. This is an exploratory challenge and unlike most code challenges will be completely subjective and the solutions will be ranked against each other via the innovation scorecard