Migration of mails stored in iPlanet Messaging server to Oracle AQ

- A Case Study

Industry

Healthcare

Project Size

Large

Problem

A healthcare portal wanted the mails stored in iPlanet messaging server to be migrated to Oracle Advanced Queuing facility. This business decision involved converting mails that were stored in HTML format to XML format. Mail functionalities like send, receive, sort, delete, clear mails from "trash" folder, CC and BCC, and move mails between folders had to be modeled on top of Oracle AQ. Migration of data had to be 100% reliable with minimal production downtime.

Software Features

Phased migration of mails to minimize production downtime
- Failure recovery during migration
- Abilities to send, receive, sort, delete, clear mails from "trash" folder, CC and BCC, and move mails between folders

Technology

Java (EJB), Perl, JMS, Java Mail, XML, iPlanet Messaging Server, Websphere 3.5.2, and Oracle 9i

Challenges

Oracle AQ's JMS API used to throw segmentation violation error on the version of Java used by the Websphere platform. Just In Time (JIT) compilation had to be disabled for the JVM to overcome this error as this degraded the performance of the whole application, the mail subsystem was isolated to a separate JVM process. As the performance of AQ's JMS API was not acceptable for certain operations, stored procedures had to be written to speed up those operations.

Phased migration of data involved keeping an audit log for the migrated mail accounts. Migration scripts had to take care of the various custom formats (and headers) used in the mail messages before converting the mails to XML format.