Navionics
Navionics changed the way people navigate by bringing to market the world’s first electronic chart device in 1984.
The company has the world’s largest database of marine and lake charts, covering the salt waters of the entire planet as well as tens of thousands of lakes and rivers. Many of these charts have been developed by way of Navionics’ proprietary surveys done both in the field and with remote sensing such as satellite imagery and airborne laser scanners.
The Challenge
Navionics was looking for a solution that would allow them to optimise the hot backup of their extensive databases dedicated to cartography. The databases were running on Oracle and allowed replication clustering backup by using applications but this was proving expensive with very high licence fees. This also required dedicated staff for continuous and effective operation.
With a database of more than 7 TB and seeing that size sharply increasing, both for POI (point of interest) and custom cartographic features (typical of advanced Navionics
applications), the challenge was set to find an alternative approach.
Navionics needed a highly scalable system that allowed the easy management and unified procedures to optimise the timing of backups but also (and critically) restore everything in case of a system failure.
The Solution
Navionics engaged 2ndQuadrant to produce a migration feasibility plan and disaster recovery requirements. Once a migration roadmap from Oracle to PostgreSQL was in place, 2ndQuadrant set up and performed hardware benchmarking on Navionics servers. As Navionics PostgreSQL servers came online, their team were trained by 2ndQuadrant in order to facilitate a smooth transition to prepare them for running and administrating their new systems.
Once live, Navionics implemented 2ndQuadrant‘s customised version of Barman. (Barman is a backup and recovery management tool – see details at the end). This allowed the team to optimise the software for the management of complex mapping data and large-size databases, with worldwide coverage and billions of database records.
“With consulting performed by 2ndQuadrant, Navionics welcomed a migration to PostgreSQL, drastically lowering the cost of our database management and software licensing.”
Laura Passigni, Project Manager, Navionics
The system went into full live production in March 2012, with all data migrated from Oracle.
2ndQuadrant continues to work with the Navionics team to keep their PostgreSQL systems healthy and stable with Remote DBA services as well as 24/7 Production Support coverage.
2ndQuadrant Services Provided
- Migration Assessment
- Training
- Consultancy
- Remote DBA
- Production Support
About Barman
Barman (Backup and Recovery Manager) is an open-source administration 
tool for disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers written in Python. It allows your organisation toperform remote backups of multiple servers in business critical environments and help DBAs during the recovery phase.
Visit pgbarman.org for more information
About 2ndQuadrant
2ndQuadrant provides PostgreSQL solutions for the Enterprise. Our support engineers have over 100 years of combined code contributions to the PostgreSQL project, making us the only company to contribute enterprise features to all of the last 13 releases.
This is paired with 17+ years of hands-on experience through client engagements and allows us to integrate customized solutions with our customers – making 2ndQuadrant the Gold Standard for PostgreSQL products & services.