Oracle has announced that Dubai World's new portal www.DubaiTrade.ae, which combines the electronic services for Dubai Ports, Customs & Freezone Corporation, migrated to Oracle Database 10g, and Oracle Application Server 10g overnight during Eid-ul-Fitr (an Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan), to run completely on Oracle technology.

Dubai World, a holding company that stretches across many strategic and rapidly developing business sectors in the emirate, developed the bilingual portal to cater for over 13,000 users from across myDPA, eMirsal, e-ATA, myJAFZA and DMCC sites. As the company grows, embracing new business segments and companies, the need to standardize to ensure a clear upgrade path and user experience prompted the management team to turn to the IT department for a technology solution capable of addressing the portal's current and future requirements. The project was designed over a 40day period by a team incorporating Oracle consultants and Dubai World IT staff.  It culminated in the seamless overnight automated migration from two hardware platforms and a simultaneous upgrade from two different versions of previous Oracle database software. The applications running the portal operation were re-written for Oracle Application Server 10g, which is based on a scalable J2EE server and is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware portfolio, to ensure integration across information silos and a clear growth strategy for future development.

"The ambitious project to consolidate the DubaiTrade.ae portal on Oracle technology was driven by our commitment to offer our customers a highly available, scalable and secure online experience, shifting more transactions to the web and thereby reducing transactions over the counter," commented Wassim Hamwi, Chief Technology Officer, Dubai World. "Capitalising on the technological advances offered by grid computing through Oracle Database 10g, and the integration of applications through Oracle Fusion Middleware will enable us to drive a higher percentage of transactions online to offset the dramatic rise in number of transactions across Dubai World's numerous business units. Taking transactions online frees Dubai World staff to focus on developing new solutions to service emerging business sectors, contributing to the ongoing economic development of Dubai."

The implementation provided the IT team with a new application and infrastructure framework that provides a strong base for future application development, as well as much higher levels of scalability.
"DubaiTrade.ae has had a fantastic reception from the many companies across the Dubai World group, and has grown a large user group," commented Mahmoud Al Bastaki, chief information officer, corporate IT department, DubaiTrade.ae at Dubai World. "As the number of users grows, the improved system stability will vastly reduced downtime and system errors, and give users a refreshed interface and improved navigational tools, which make it easier to perform operations and search for information."

"As one of the world's largest implementations of Oracle 10g to date, the smooth completion of the DubaiTrade.ae migration is a success story to be proud of," commented Husam Dajani, senior VP, Oracle MEA. "Critical business processes that keep our city running are transacted on this portal, with users ranging from customs and excise officers, port authority officials, to DMCC commodities traders. Rated as the number one database by both Gartner  and IDC , Oracle Database 10g has unique clustering capabilities, allowing companies to getter better information from their business data."

Overall, the migration to Oracle was very successful and no major issue was encountered during the postimplementation support. The availability of advanced features in Oracle Database 10g, such as Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Automatic Performance Diagnostic and Tuning feature, Automatic Shared Memory Management, Tablespace Management Enhancements, RMAN Enhancements and 10g Resource Manager Enhancements greatly facilitated the smooth transition. Additionally, the implementation has delivered key improvements in areas of availability and recovery from failures, which should lead to a major reduction in recovery time for critical applications. Establishing the foundations for new applications and processes will also be eased by this migration to Oracle Database 10g, enabling the team at Dubai World to react to the next boom sector in Dubai's swiftly expanding economy.