A Vibrant Community Life in a Strategic Location
Situated on the picturesque Grand River, the City
of Brantford features a vibrant community life and a
strategic location in the heart of Southern Ontario. It
is just a short drive from Toronto, Hamilton, London,
Niagara Falls and Buffalo, New York.
Acknowledged internationally as “The Telephone
City”, Brantford marks with pride that dramatic moment
in 1874 when Alexander Graham Bell invented
the telephone; launching one of the world’s greatest
communication industries. Three years later, Brantford
was incorporated as a City with 10,000 individuals.
Today, the City of Brantford continues to grow
with a population of 90,192 (source: Canada 2006
Census).
Proud to be the hometown of “the Great One”, Wayne
Gretzky, Brantford is a city where amateur and minor
sports are an integral part of community life. Wayne’s
father, Walter Gretzky, still lives here in the city he’s
always called home. |
A New Enterprise Asset Management System
The I.T. Services Department of the City of Brantford is responsible
for the maintenance, integration and availability
of the off-the-shelf “best of breed” systems and internally
developed custom applications implemented by the City to
service its citizens. The City has deployed the Avantis Enterprise
Asset Management software solution, to manage
asset and work order information. As part of this deployment,
I.T. Services needed to integrate to Avantis data contained
in disparate systems operated by the City to manage
thousands of linear assets within the water distribution, sanitary
and storm sewer networks. Most of this data is contained
in a custom system, MIDS (Municipal Infrastructure
Data Standard) which along with Avantis uses Oracle as the
back-end DBMS.
“We had multiple data integration needs related to the Avantis
deployment,” explained Scott Hall, Manager of Corporate
Information for the City of Brantford. “Initially, we needed
to load the system with data related to our infrastructure.
Then, once the system was up and running, we needed to
maintain the data in sync between the reference applications
and Avantis – ensure that any updates to the source
data would be propagated to Avantis.”
Historically, data integration processes used by the City of
Brantford were developed as Java programs, and executed
by the Windows Scheduler. However, maintenance of
these processes was complex and costly. “The MIDS to
Avantis Interface project was a good opportunity for us to
study data integration solutions,” explained Muzammil Rajpurkar,
Database Administrator with the City of Brantford.
“We looked at several GUI-based data integration products,
focusing specifically on their robustness and the return on
investment we could get out of them.”
Key Facts
Industry: Public Sector
Type of Project: Real-Time Data Synchronization
Management of Municipal Infrastructure: Water distribution,
sanitary and storm sewer networks, work orders integration
Oracle, DB2/400, XML, Web Services, Custom APIs
Packaged and custom applications: Avantis, Daffron,
Municipal Infrastructure Assets Management,
Real-time Data Synchronization,
Data migration
|
Robust and Versatile Data Integration
After discarding several process-oriented solutions,
I.T. Services settled on the data integration approach,
more versatile and better suited for performing both batch
loads and real-time data synchronization. “We selected Talend
Open Studio for several reasons,” said Muzammil Rajpurkar.
“The breadth of connectors provided by the solution
allows us to connect to all our sources and targets. It is also
a very robust solution, which guarantees that the synchronization
processes are running reliably and that our systems
are kept in sync, all the time, without any data loss. And
then, the open source model limited the need for an upfront
investment, an important factor in a fiscally responsible organization,
financed by taxpayers’ money.”
Of special importance for I.T. Services is the native support
for Web Services, built into Talend Open Studio. “The
Talend processes extract data from the Oracle source systems
in real-time, every time a record is created or updated,”
detailed Muzammil Rajpurkar. “This data is converted
to an XML format, and it is transformed and enriched
through XSLT transformations to match the format required
by Avantis. It is then inserted or updated in Avantis through
their Web Services API. Finally, the return codes from the
Web Services are analyzed to confirm the success of the
operation. All these operations are performed automatically
by Talend.”
"Beyond the obvious cost savings, the open
source model also brings a tremendous advantage:
the community that supports it. We
have received excellent support from other
users and from the Talend team via the forums
and bugtracker. Open source is clearly the model of the future for software development, and Talend as a vendor has fully embraced it."
Muzammil Rajpurkar -
Database Administrator |
In addition to the Avantis data integration project, I.T. Services
have initiated other projects using Talend Open Studio.
One of them consists of extracting data from the Daffron
utilities management software that manages electrical and
water supply in the City of Brantford. “The Daffron system is
based on DB2 on the AS/400 platform, and it was important
for us to extract the water meter location and contact information
on the utilities networks from this system, so that
they are also loaded in the Avantis platform in order to generate
work orders,” clarified Muzammil Rajpurkar. “Talend
Open Studio, with its native DB2/400 connectors, allowed
us to develop this process very quickly.”
Beyond these projects,
Talend Open Studio has become the standard integration
platform for all data migration and synchronization
processes deployed by the City of Brantford.