[A StarSQL Case Study] Bank of America Manages Access to Critical DB2/400 Data Bank of America’s Commercial Real Estate Group dramatically reduced the time required to produce crucial management reports, as well as greatly enhancing its query environment. Bank of America is among the top providers of commercial and industrial loans worldwide, with more than $55 billion outstanding at the end of 1997. To manage its commercial mortgages, Bank of America’s Commercial Real Estate Group recently deployed a new IBM AS/400-based commercial mortgage data application. Identifying the Problem Bank of America utilizes two IBM AS/400 Model 310s running DB2/400; its production system-which houses a 35 Gigabyte DB2/400 database-tracks its commercial mortgages. A development system, which resides in another geographic location so it also serves as a disaster recovery safeguard, runs a 95 Gigabyte DB2/400 database. "It’s a huge loan and accounting system," said Gary Blouin, vice president with Bank of America, who manages the MIS Automation Group, reporting directly to the manager of loan servicing. "We track all the loan data such as billing information and collateral to monitor and maintain our portfolio of loans." After Bank of America’s Commercial Real Estate Group successfully deployed its new AS/400 environment, it went looking for a DB2 data access method to serve its PC user community. Blouin said, "We prepare some pretty complex reports for management, and the simple query language that was available on the AS/400 couldn’t provide us the functionality that we wanted. "The people that work for me are very familiar with using PC tools such as Microsoft’s Visual Basic and Access," Blouin said. "The transition to the ASA/400 environment was pretty difficult for us as we didn’t have a lot of AS/400 training. "One of our key requirements was to gain access to this DB2/400 data for constant analysis," Blouin continued. "Previously, we were using other ODBC drivers, but they had some serious limitations," Blouin said. "We have a massive amount of loan data - one of the main reasons we purchased StarQuest’s StarSQL data access driver is because the product had no problems with our large table sizes. We had immediate access to all of the data, which is very important in our fast-moving environment." Key Management Reports Ten to 15 users access the DB2/400 data constantly throughout the day from anywhere in the world via PCs running NT 4.0 to pull DB2 data off for report generation. "StarSQL is providing us immediate worldwide access to DB2 data from tools we are intimately familiar with," Blouin said. "It was much simpler for us to pull the data directly from the AS/400 and use our LAN based tools to provide the meaningful reports that we wanted. We are now able to take the strength of our PC tools to leverage the data directly off the AS/400." According to Blouin, Bank of America has been very impressed with the robustness of the StarSQL driver. "Unlike other ODBC drivers we tested, StarSQL is a very clean product," Blouin said. It was easy to install and basically requiring no administration. In addition," Blouin added, "the performance has been great. It is providing us fast, transparent access to our DB2 data. It is the closest thing to directly accessing SQL Server." Blouin said another key advantage afforded by StarSQL was its support of TCP/IP. "The fact that StarSQL runs on TCP/IP was a big advantage for Bank of America," he said. Dramatic Manpower and Time Savings According to Blouin, since deploying StarSQL , the Bank has been able to automate the process of pulling down data from the AS/400. "We no longer have to manually initiate processes-our batch processor simply goes into the AS/400 and automatically pulls the data down and does all the process, so most of the work is done by the computer, freeing manpower for other projects," he said. "Before we had StarSQL, we were querying the data on the AS/400, producing a file, and then we had to go to another computer and manually download the file, massage the data within it to create reports-a painstaking process that used to take us several hours," Blouin said. "Using the StarSQL driver to directly access the DB2 data has allowed us to reduce our report turnaround times by up to 75 percent. Our reporting capabilities have been greatly enhanced," Blouin concluded. "This is a critical application for us, and StarSQL has made it much more effective."