How UZ Leuven Migrates 200 Applications Without Disrupting Medical Care

UZ Leuven is one of Belgium’s largest hospitals and one of the most respected medical institutions in Europe. A Red Cross award-winner for excellence in hospital management, UZ Leuven was the first Belgian hospital to win accreditation from the Joint Commission International (JCI) for high standards for care quality and patient safety. Building on this reputation, UZ Leuven had ambitious plans to work intensely together with eight other healthcare providers to form a new group: Nexus Health. The heart of this collaboration is the hospital information system of UZ Leuven. To execute on this collaboration strategy, UZ Leuven IT knew that it had to prepare infrastructure to scale (up to four times the current size) if it were to manage this growth while upholding the organization’s reputation for reliability and quality of care.

UZ Leuven selected Progress DataDirect OpenAccess to solve its database migration challenge. Using OpenAccess, Reynders and his team were able to create a database emulation layer that made it possible to pre-configure and test database integration with DB2 on all 200 applications.

Reynders and his team went through a four-step process to migrate their applications to DB2 without having to take them offline. They installed an OpenAccess driver on the application and connected the application to Sybase through the OpenAccess Server.

Once the application was talking to OpenAccess, not Sybase, Reynders and his team could add DB2 as a second data source, connecting to the application through the OpenAccess Server. Then, after configuring and testing DB2 in its integration with the app, the team could switch to DB2 without needing to take the application offline at all. They could pre-configure and test every single application-database connection before they flipped the switch on the day of the “Big Bang.”