Cancer Research UK data synchronization and transformation

Cancer Research UK utilizes SymmetricDS for flagship Race for Life event website.

Cancer Research UK utilizes SymmetricDS for flagship Race for Life event website

Headquarters
London, England

Industry
Medical Research

Number of Nodes
2

Cancer Research UK, the UK’s leading cancer charity, conducts a variety of fundraising activities.
Race for Life, Cancer Research UK’s flagship event, comprises over 240 events taking place across
the UK every year, where women run, jog or walk a five-kilometer course to raise money for the
charity. Race for Life, the largest women-only fundraising event in the United Kingdom, is supported
by the Race for Life website, which includes race events, team and individual entry, online fundraising,
supporter participation, and shopping to support the cause. Through Race for Life, over six million
women have raised over £457 million for Cancer Research UK’s life-saving work.

Cancer Research UK initiated a large-scale update of their Race for Life website in 2011. Their goal
was to create an entirely new website using a new database platform while continuing to run call
centre software, fulfillment services and reporting against the legacy database. As such, they found
themselves in need of database synchronization software that not only synchronizes data changes
between different database platforms, but also transforms the data to accommodate the different
schema models of the two platforms.

After a search of possible synchronization software, Cancer Research UK selected SymmetricDS to
achieve their goals. SymmetricDS provided the flexibility they needed and allowed all synchronization
and transformation to be accomplished through configuration without software modifications.
SymmetricDS also provides Cancer Research UK with the confidence of proven scalability, reliability
to handle future loads, automatic recovery from network downtime, and other issues which can occur
in production environments. For their implementation, Cancer Research UK utilized JumpMind’s
JumpStart program, thereby pairing JumpMind’s experienced developers with Cancer Research UK’s
developers to analyze and implement the solution. The organisation can also rely on expert production
support for SymmetricDS through JumpMind’s enterprise production support subscription. Today,
SymmetricDS is an integral part of Cancer Research UK’s Race for Life website, helping to support
their vital work.

“The SymmetricDS tool was the ideal software solution for the data synchronization scenario we were required to implement. In addition to providing all the required functional features, it uses the same Java code base as the new website, making it easier for our inhouse team to work with. SymmetricDS also beat other products we evaluated on price. The JumpStart program provided a quick and cost efficient means of getting the solution up and running, ensuring we were able to deliver the complete solution within challenging timescales.”

– Calum Hutchison, Project Manager Cancer Research UK