Clalbit Systems is the software development arm of Clal Insurance, one of the largest insurance companies in Israel.

Clalbit Systems has been using SCM methodologies to manage application code. All Clalbit Systems’ projects utilize ALM methodologies, including source control and clear segregation between development, integration, internal QA, external QA, and production environments. All systems are deployed over identically configured infrastructure to ensure testing efficiency.

The Problem

One major Clalbit project entailed a complete rewrite of the application that manages pension accounts, to support recent business guidelines and regulations.

The project required data conversion in support of the new application, and suddenly, their lack of a Database Change Management solution was looming large.

While their source development practices were as advanced as possible, Clalbit Systems’ management felt that they needed to achieve similar capabilities managing database artifacts while correlating those changes to code changes. The reasons are simple.

Database structure and lookup table data are an integral part of the system.

During code modification, developers work on a local copy, publishing the change only when the work is complete and the code is returned to the system via the SCM system’s check-in operations.

Conversely, the database is a central resource. Changes to database artifacts become active as soon as a DBA or developer commits the change or runs the associated DDL command.

To protect from the unintended consequences of such action, a policy enforcement that prevents code being overwritten was deemed necessary.

The Solution – dbMaestro TeamWork™

Clalbit Systems decided to use dbMaestro TeamWork™ for database version control, increasing the ability of their development teams to coordinate activities through the check-out / check-in mechanism as well as adding the ability to capture a version at any time during the development cycle and set it as base line for deployment.

dbMaestro TeamWork™ provided the following advantages:

• Reduced merge times for each cycle – from a minimum of four hours to minutes
• Freed-up human resources – before implementing dbMaestro TeamWork™, each merge cycle tied up the project leader for half a day, and stopped the relevant team from working
• Increased ability to accommodate requirements changes during development
• Improved conflict resolution of the database development deployment scripting
• Automatic labeling of sources as associated with specific version
• Automatic script generation from command line
• Increased management control – team supervisors have an accurate status of who is working on what and when
• Extended security control at the object level, enabling effective permission management

Clalbit’s Evaluation of dbMaestro TeamWork™

Jonathan Bar-Sela, Development Manager, Long Term Savings, Clalbit Systems summarized his experience:

“By implementing dbMaestro TeamWork, we finally have full control of our databases. Having our schemas, data, triggers and other database artifacts managed makes a huge difference. By integrating the application with our source control and continuous integration paradigm, we are able to deploy our application in minutes and with fewer errors.

It’s been really great working with the dbMaestro team.

They assisted to build effective processes and provided quick responses to our questions and needs.”

You can read more here.