The following is a recent discussion between Fran Stevens, Vice President of Information Technology at FARES, and TSI Project Managers. This interview was coordinated by Tina White, Production Manager at FARES.

We are the nations largest collector and provider of real estate data, serving more than 400,000 users who depend on us to make decisions every day. We collect data on one hundred million properties annually and on two million property and mortgage transactions each month. In addition, we also provide access to three billion document images using the industries most innovative technologies.

Advantage is a system of over 5000 database files containing Real Estate information on many counties across the nation. The information includes ownership, values, features, and a host of other information used by realtors, appraisers, direct marketers, and many other types of businesses.

We currently support over 600 counties nationwide in Advantage.

For each county in our system, we maintain separate files for sales, building, and land (parcel) information. This information comes to us from a variety of sources, the most important of which are the counties themselves. We typically receive and process information for every property in a county once a year. This may consist of from one to thirty files that we match and combine into a usable set of database files. In addition, we regularly receive new sales that are recorded in the counties. This information is keyed off-shore and then loaded to our system.

Our objective with the Keystone Project was to move away from our Legacy Systems to a relational database that would enable us to handle more concurrent on-line users, add additional county coverage, and give us the ability to provide more complete and robust on-line products.

"Prior to the DPS V4.00 upgrade, we were starting to plan a mainframe upgrade, which is a very costly proposition for our business. Once the V4.00 upgrade was completed, we recovered enough processing cycles to cancel our upgrade plans.”      - George Livermore        President        FARES

Keystone is a set of ORACLE databases and server applications, currently running on SUN Solaris hardware. This system provides the back-end for an array of on-line products, both dial-up and Internet, and it is also the source for our CD-based products.

We currently support more than 50,000 customers.

The Keystone Project was set up as a new data delivery system that takes advantage of the data manipulation done in Advantage. This new data delivery system was designed to handle our growth over the next 10 years.

The most significant factor was the movement of data from ADABAS to Keystone, which became critical to the success of the project. We looked at writing the necessary programs and also researched other companies that provided a solution. TSI was willing to come out for a day and discuss how their product could assist us. It seemed like a good fit and we were pleased with TSI’s responsiveness to our questions. In addition, TSI had the ability to deal with repeating groups from ADABAS, read ADABAS Plogs, and create updates for daily processing.

We face the continual challenge of having to reload each county once a year, while also providing the most recent sales updates to our customers. We do this, in part, by loading the new files from each county into a “staging” database, while updating the sales information to our “production” databases. Once we have a county loaded to Advantage “staging”, we process the files through DPS to load them to Keystone “staging”, where we can perform detailed QC and analysis to ensure that we provide only the highest quality data to our customers. When we have verified that the new files are correct, we bring the sales up to current, move them to Advantage "production”, and process the files through DPS to load them to Keystone "production”.

We couldn't move data fast enough from Advantage to Keystone. With the implementation of DPS V4.00, we have seen an improvement of 70% in our processing times.

DPS and tRelational allow us to move data from our flat-file data repository (Advantage) to our relational on-line system (Keystone) with confidence and in near real-time. Many of the transformations that occur in this process are complex and would not be easy to develop or maintain with standard programming tools. DPS provides the capabilities and the interface to make, or change, these transformations quickly and easily.

Yes, we have been extremely satisfied with the level of support and services TSI provides. Your support team is always willing to go the extra mile to help resolve any issues we may be having. Additionally, your support doesn't stop once a resolution has been identified. Your support staff always follows through to ensure the solution provided has resolved our issues.