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Case Studies
Refactoring Improves Performance and Simplifies Maintenance of Application
Project Summary and Benefits |
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RDA refactored an important Web-based application that provides OPIS business users with on-demand access to an historical archive of fuel price data. The updated technology foundation supports extensibility and provides for the long-term maintenance of the application in-house. |
About Our Client
The Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) business unit of United Communications Group (UCG) is the world's most comprehensive source for petroleum pricing and news information. OPIS distributes the most accurate, reliable and referenced petroleum prices via e-mail, Web, fax, newsletter, and 3rd party vendors to the top 200 oil companies, thousands of distributors, traders, government and commercial buyers of petroleum products.
Background
TimeSeries is a Web-based application that provides business users with on-demand access to an historical archive of over 20 years of spot pricing for gasoline, diesel, and LP products and gasoline and diesel rack prices for U.S. markets.
The original TimeSeries application was developed by a third party vendor and all subsequent maintenance activities and product enhancements were outsourced to this same group. The technology platform on which the application was originally developed had become obsolete and the application had not proven to be as extensible as OPIS's business goals required.
TimeSeries had nonetheless proven to be a very important application. Given its limitations in terms of extensibility, known performance issues, legacy technology base and lack of in-house development expertise, OPIS engaged RDA to re-factor the application on an updated technology foundation to support extensibility and provide for the long-term maintenance of the application in-house.
Solution Detail
The OPIS TimeSeries solution built on SQL Server 2005 and .NET provides an historical archive of wholesale oil price history for the last 23 years housed in a dimensional warehouse model. End users of the application may select from a number of different filtering options in retrieving data from the historical archive. SQL Server 2005's database engine provides exceptional performance that dramatically exceeds the metrics collected for the legacy system using DB2 and SQL Server 2000 that TimeSeries is replacing.
Using Visual Studio 2005 enabled the implementation team for the project to complete the effort in a fraction of the time required to build and ultimately enhance the legacy system that it will replace. The project entailed replicating the functionality of a legacy system as well as adding significant new features and benefits using ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), AJAX and other Microsoft tools. The project came in on time and on budget due to the fact that the development team was able to implement, debug and deploy the technologically diverse solution from a single integrated toolset.
Technically Speaking
The presentation layer of the solution was implemented using C# and ASP.NET 2.0. ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and the AJAX toolkit were used to reduce the number of postbacks in the user interface and implement interactive user interface components such as tabs, modal dialogs, collapsible panels and auto-complete fields in the historical archive query wizard.
The business and data access layer of the application were constructed using WCF in order to provide a loose coupling of the business logic and data from the user interface and provide OPIS with the option of exposing various TimeSeries operations as secure, public web services at some point in the future.
The legacy application had relied on a relational SQL Server 2000 database and queries through a linked server interface to an IBM DB2 server to provide database services. The new TimeSeries was rebuilt around a SQL Server 2005 dimensional data warehouse design that makes use of SQL Server Analysis Services and Integration Services to extract, transform and load data from these legacy sources and then aggregate and calculate a number of measures in order to optimize performance.
The file generation capabilities of the system were rebuilt using Visual Studio tools for Office (VSTO). New functionality that makes use of the native capabilities of Excel enables users to perform advanced analysis by constructing line, bar and scatter plot charts with statistical calculations based on their query results.
Finally, a standalone Microsoft Access application that housed the business rules, calculated the billing rates for TimeSeries users and generated a custom file format for OPIS's ERP system was rebuilt using ASP.NET 2.0 and integrated into the TimeSeries application.
Technologies Used
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 was the primary environment for development of the source code which comprises the presentation and business tier of the application. SQL Server 2005 Management Studio was the primary environment for development of the packages used to extract, transform and load the data for the data warehouse of this solution. In addition, Management Studio was used to visually design and implement table structures and to develop, test and debug stored procedures, triggers, views and other database scripts.
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 2005 was used to provide version control and code branching functionality for the team developing the solution.
The following Microsoft products and technologies were utilized as part of this solution:
- .NET Framework 2.0/3.0/3.5
- C# 2.0
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (including SQL 2005 Database Engine, Analysis Services and Integration Services)
- ASP.NET 2.0 w/ AJAX Extensions and AJAX Toolkit
- Microsoft Office Enterprise (Excel)
- Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office SE
- Windows Communication Foundation
- Internet Information Server 6.0
- Windows Server 2003
