About Client
One of Asia’s largest e-commerce marketplaces that assists businesses with services in the areas of e-auction and e-procurement of resources such as steel, oil, and coal. The platform handles large transaction volumes, multiple buyer–seller interactions, and time-sensitive bidding processes that depend heavily on database reliability and performance.
With an annual revenue of USD 185 million, the client operates in a highly competitive digital commerce environment where platform downtime, data inconsistency, or performance degradation can directly impact business outcomes.
Challenge
The client was using IBM DB2 as its core database system and decided to initiate a db2 to postgres migration driven by both strategic and operational reasons:
- Architectural limitations of DB2
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS), while DB2 functions primarily as a relational database (RDBMS). The client needed greater flexibility to work with advanced data types, extensible schemas, and modern database constructs that PostgreSQL natively supports. These capabilities were becoming increasingly important as the platform evolved to support more complex business logic and third-party integrations. - Rising licensing and operational costs
PostgreSQL is a highly secure, enterprise-grade open-source database, whereas IBM DB2 requires a commercial license. As data volumes grew and workloads expanded, DB2 licensing and maintenance costs became difficult to justify. Migrating to PostgreSQL offered a sustainable, long-term cost advantage without compromising performance or security. - Lack of in-house migration expertise
The client did not have sufficient internal IT expertise to manage data inconsistencies across multiple environments or to accurately assess the impact of migrating DB2-specific constructs—such as stored procedures, SQL dialects, and functions—to PostgreSQL. - High risk of application disruption
The application was tightly coupled with DB2 through stored procedures, SQL syntax, and service-layer calls. A simple lift-and-shift migration approach would have introduced significant risk of application failures, data issues, and performance regressions.
As a result, the client required external expertise to safely migrate DB2 to PostgreSQL while ensuring application stability, data integrity, and uninterrupted business operations.
