CA DATACOM Review

Scalability and the online maintainability of definitions are definite advantages for us

On the platform that I work on, it is the sole database package, and there's a whole lot of production going on every day: many transactions, many online users, batch, etc., accessing the database.

We've had it for so long, so it's status quo. But we've added all sorts of functionality to our applications and there are no issues with databases. Anything developers request, we're able to accomplish.

Also, we deal a lot with government regulation - and not to talk about what the company does - but anything that they require of us, because we transmit data back and forth with them, we're able to do that with no problems. And there have been a lot of changes over the past five years that our government dictated regarding what we actually end up doing. So, we're able to be extremely flexible with that.

Scalability is definitely one thing. The size of the database can grow without any issues. We've got one database table that's got over a billion rows in it; quite a bit of data, and it handles access like a champ.

Nowadays, CA is doing a lot of improving as far as online maintainability of definitions, which is a huge improvement over the past. I'm able to do a lot of changes without any outage.

There are still some things - and I know they are working on some of them - but for the "no-outage maintainability" of things, they are making improvements as we speak, but there is definitely still room for more of that.

Stability is 9.5 out of 10. It's right up there, but it's definitely not perfect. We have had instances within the past year where we were able to attempt to do something and cause an outage.

Scalability is definitely 10 out of 10.

We're in touch, we kind of know each other. It's definitely a 10 out of 10.

We do the software upgrades, we're involved in one right now. And some of that is going back and forth with CA's tech support and finding some errors and addressing them. They are quick to respond. 

It's rather simple. Again, I've been doing it for a couple decades now, so I don't have to think too much about what I'm doing because it works. And they've definitely made improvements to the upgrade process over the years. It used to be more complex.

Right now, we're pretty well locked in with this product. I know we are looking at a migration, which would potentially be off of the mainframe platform. Right now we're just using what we have, and whether anything will happen with that massive project or not, we have no idea, but it is being investigated. There's certainly no software or changes that will be going on for quite a while anyway.

Follow the instructions as given and you won't have any problems. If you have any questions, tech support is there, they're good. As I said, I've gotten to know a couple of those individuals just by going back and forth on different issues, and they are extremely easy to work with. 

There's a blog-type posting out there on their site, in what they call CA Community, where a lot of other long term users answer questions, have all kinds of suggestions, for anybody new getting in, which would be huge. You get tech support from other users, in effect.