Meeting the challenges of migrating E&P data

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GlobeData migration challenges don’t come any bigger than in the oil, gas and petroleum industry. By its very nature, the type of data that is collected in the exploration and production (E&P) of oil and gas is geographically vast and operationally complex.

Just consider the variety of applications in use at oil fields, rigs, wells and laboratories, and you realise the breadth and depth of data in the digital oilfield. How oil companies carry out well data management is crucial to their operations.

The challenge is that there are so many sources of data and so many variables to be taken into account. E&P data management is typically conducted using proprietary systems that could be different depending on which country they’re in, and even which department of the business they’re in.

Like many other industries, the Oil & Gas sector is looking to bring its disparate data sources into a central Master Data store, typified by the PPDM data model, to standardise, professionalise and simplify the management and analysis of its data. This is a tremendous data migration challenge.

Tools are available to help migrate applications, but they need source code access to produce the best results, which is an unlikely position for an oil company to be in. Such tools work better with business-oriented languages such as COBOL, rather than general purpose programming languages like C, Java or C#, which can be difficult for a software tool to analyse.

That’s why many companies turn to sophisticated middleware solutions for E&P data management.  These solutions provide essential continuity for the business during and after the implementation of the Master Data Management solution. Regardless of the physical location and representation of data, the middleware – a way of allowing different hardware and software applications to work together – ensures that each application sees what it wants to, when it needs to.

A large chunk of the middleware solution is the data integration technology required to achieve this transparently, which is where ETL Solutions’ tools – such as our Transformation Manager data migration software – and expertise have a beneficial role to play. We have a strong track record of working with Oil & Gas middleware providers, as well as in-house teams, to ensure that well data management systems work swiftly and seamlessly.

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