Database migration that helps you be ‘better than the best’

The Japanese term dantotsu is difficult to translate, but roughly means ‘better than the best’. Since its founding nearly 100 years ago, Japanese construction and mining equipment multinational, Komatsu, has striven to provide its customers with a service that achieves just that.

As part of this mission, Komatsu launched its Dantotsu Strategy in 2003, which included the creation of a line of ‘Dantotsu Products’, labelled as such due to their unrivalled design and performance. But today the company knows that achieving dantotsu means looking beyond the machines themselves – instead analysing the data they produce.

Komatsu and its quest for dantotsu

Construction is an extremely data-rich industry – in Australia alone, Komatsu has more than 30,000 machines in daily operation that stream data on productivity, machine condition, and other factors. This makes data modernization essential – and choosing the right database management system a key business decision.

“We have 1.5 terabytes of data and that number is growing fast,” explains Nipun Sharma, Analytics Architect, Business Technology & Systems at Komatsu Australia. “We currently process around a million records per day ­– and we determined Azure SQL Database Managed Instance was the best choice for us in terms of scalability, cost, and performance”.

Modernize your data platform

One of the key factors that influenced the Japanese company’s decision was Azure SQL Database Managed Instance’s near 100 percent compatibility with the latest on-premises SQL Servers, making migration quick and simple – not to mention, extremely cost-effective.

“We moved our entire database and the Discovery Hub analytics implementation to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance in less than two weeks, and since then we’ve seen a 49 percent cost reduction and 25 to 30 percent performance gains,” says Sharma.

But Komatsu’s performance gains and savings – while clearly worth shouting about – are in line with what was envisaged. Expected return on investment for migrating to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is 212%, with post-migration payback predicted to be under six months. Coupled with performance benefits that allow you to scale your workloads in real-time, all in a secure cloud environment ­– migrating from an SQL Server is the logical choice for any company wanting to achieve dantotsu.