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Problem: Our client had a custom message storage database provided to them by a vendor who subsequently went out of business. The database corrupted itself every few months taking one of the client's mission critical systems down while the database was reconstructed. The client had paid a premium price for fault tolerant hardware, so a software failure that kept the system down for one to two hours was clearly unacceptable.

Action: We designed and implemented a solution to convert to a standard database. An interface was produced which allowed existing software to use the new database without modification. An application was also produced to examine the database in real time and display "percent full" statistics. This application was very important because there are no restrictions on our client's customers' database usage.

Result: Failures ceased. None of our client's tens of thousands of customers were adversely affected by the conversion. The only external manifestation of the change was a significant improvement in system response time.