Database Freedom for the Victorian Jury Management Solution and Court Services Victoria: AWS RDS Postgres Migration

Akkodis has been assisting the Victorian Court Services by managing and maintaining the Jury Management Service.

The architecture of the Java application that drives this service revolves around a central database, and for many years, this has been an Oracle Standard Edition 1 based database. Running within the AWS Cloud, this database was a fully managed relational database, which optimised the operational administrative overhead.

As Oracle SE 1 was nearing end-of-life, Akkodis reviewed the upgrade path to Oracle SE2. However, the usage of this database was simple and common: table storage and relational queries, but the combined cost for this simple usage was relatively high.

Working with Court Services, Akkodis reviewed the choices in front of them:

  • Simple upgrade process to Oracle SE2
  • Database optimisation to another platform to reduce cost

Akkodis proposed a migration from Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (RDS) Oracle to AWS RDS Postgres. This project required technical architecture of fine grained data structures, data queries, and coding implementation to support a replacement database.

Akkodis performed a Migration assessment, implement database schema & software (code) conversion, cut over with data conversion and data migration. In addition, further data validation during migration was performed to ensure integrity.

Akkodis has extensive experience in helping customers migrate from expensive commercial databases to a managed open-source service in the AWS Cloud. The Land Registry of Western Australia was authoritative in an Oracle solution until June 2015, but since July 2015, this has also been secured in an AWS RDS Postgres solution.

The cost for a like-for-like compute and storage saw the per hour cost for the database component drop from US$1.033/hour, to US$0.60/hour before reservations or discounts, a saving of over 41%. This service has a corresponding non-production environment(s), and additional savings were replicated and the Return On Investment (ROI) was calculated to be three months.

Akkodis continues to work with its customers to help them optimise and modernise their technology solutions.