Moving your systems to a Cloud environment is no easy task! One of the biggest challenges is being able to report off your data that seems to be held in a database off in some magical, distant land of clouds! This can be exacerbated if the database is not the same as the one behind your reporting tool.

This talk will detail the issues UCD encountered when moving its Research Management System to The Cloud and trying to report from an MS SQL Server database via Oracle, including the solution that, not only worked for this project, but for all current and future reporting from non-Oracle databases and the challenges in implementing this solution.

The immediate solution to this problem is a common one; use Oracle Gateway technology which allows an Oracle database to interact with a multitude of non-Oracle databases, however, this usually requires the installation of Oracle software on the non-Oracle database server which is a no-no for most Cloud based providers.

UCD’s solution was to create an internal central Oracle Gateway server that acts as a liaison between the reporting Oracle database and the non-Oracle database. This solution means that the only changes on the provider’s side is to allow access of the gateway server to its reporting database and all software and updates are handled internally and only on the gateway server(s).