INFOWEEK: Lock Manager failure caused Oracle 7 Europcar crash

The "Top Story" this week in Information Week is entitled "Under Repair-- Europe's top car-rental service struggles with a huge and troubled client-server migration." It says Europcar set out to migrate data from 55 mainframes and minis scattered across the continent to a distributed client-server, relational database environment. After a technical glitch crashed the $400 million system, Europcar and development partner Perot Systems are struggling to make the much-touted system work on a broad scale. The new system crashed for three days in April, and has been operating at only half capacity since then. There were too many total users so they went back to the old systems in France and Germany. Apparently Perot Systems didn't have enough people working on the installation. Solutions were found only when nearly 40 engineers were brought in to handle the migration.

Oracle France Marketing Manager Jean-Marc Giry says the crash was due to the failure of Oracle 7's lock manager, which mediates data requests in distributed environments. But the time constraints pressured Oracle to "deploy without adequately testing" the system, Giry admits. He says an upgrade to Oracle 7 has now solved the lock manager problem. The database runs on Sequent servers in a data center near Paris.

Perot's European managing director for Europe says that the priority was speed: schedule was everything. "The decision was made up front that there were going to be some risks.

Mike Willett
Storage Computer Corp.
11 Riverside Street
Nashua, NH 03062
Tel. 603-880-3005 Received on Sat Sep 24 1994 - 03:46:21 CEST