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[DENIC Presse <presse AT denic.de>]

PRESS RELEASE

Dear Sir or Madam,

Yesterday, it was granted for the second time, the Database Award of the 
German computer magazine "COMPUTERWOCHE" and its partner Oracle. 
Innovative spirit, strategic importance to the company and sophisticated 
technologies are the criteria to determine the winners. This year, DENIC 
is one of them. Participating for the first time, the registry immediately 
won the second place. 

As the second-largest Internet registry in the world, DENIC administers 
the more than 15 million domain names of the German Top Level Domain .de. 
Accordingly, the requirements to be met by the database, the core 
applications, like the registration system and the whois lookup service, 
and the accounting system are very demanding. The data amount having grown 
to terabyte level, time had come to upgrade the old database and adapt it 
to today's business needs. DENIC decided to carry out a complete redesign 
of the data model and launched the DB refactoring project. The aim of this 
project was improved data integrity at enhanced performance to thus create 
a database that facilitated future adaptations.

Database migration during ongoing operation to ensure uninterrupted 
availability of all DENIC services was the particular challenge of the 
project. To this end, two databases – the old one and a new one – were 
operated in parallel, so that service migration could be implemented step 
by step without disturbing operation. In the first step, data were entered 
and continually updated in the new database. This process was accompanied 
by repeated consistency checks of the old and the new database. Long-term 
parallel operation of the two databases made the last step, the shut-down 
of the old database on 27 December 2011, almost a formality.

All in all a tremendous challenge. The jury was impressed: "The project 
illustrated how sustainability can be achieved through an innovative data 
model," reads the motivation of the jury’s choice. "Moreover, the new 
system was launched with a terabyte migration during ongoing operation, 
and the users did not even notice it." 

The result is a high-performance database that processes business 
transactions up to ten times quicker than before and that provides a 
future-proof data model. "Our staff has been greatly committed to 
implement this project successfully," says Marcos Sanz Grossón, Head of 
DENIC's Software Engineering Department. "I am very pleased about the 
recognition the project has received with the Database Award; it will be 
an incentive for our future work."
In a video portrait created by COMPUTERWOCHE and commented by the jury, 
experts from DENIC provide background information and explicate the 
meaning of the project:
http://www.computerwoche.de/subnet/oracle-senior-it/2512423/.
Kind regards

Beate Schulz
Public Relations
-- 

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E-Mail: presse AT denic.de
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Angaben nach § 25a Absatz 1 GenG:
DENIC eG (Sitz: Frankfurt am Main)
Vorstand: Sabine Dolderer, Helga Krüger, Carsten Schiefner, Dr. Jörg 
Schweiger 
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Elmar Knipp
Eingetragen unter Nr. 770 im Genossenschaftsregister, Amtsgericht 
Frankfurt am Main

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