Caylent Catalysts™
Database Evolution
Accelerate Your Database Modernization with AI-Driven Migrations
Teamfront Achieves a 90% faster Database Migration to Amazon Babelfish with Caylent Accelerate™
Generative AI
Migrations
At a glance
Teamfront Portfolio Company Arborgold achieves a 90% more efficient migration to Babelfish for PostgreSQL with Caylent’s GenAI-powered Caylent Accelerate™.
Solution Implemented
→ Collaboratively identified and remediated stored procedures (SPs) for Amazon Babelfish compatibility.
→ Migrated five SQL Server clusters with over 2,500 SPs to Babelfish, leveraging Caylent Accelerate™.
→ Retired 1,850 unused SPs identified by Caylent Accelerate™, streamlining the migration.
→ Guided the deployment of a production-ready Aurora PostgreSQL cluster optimized with AWS Graviton-based instances and built-in disaster recovery capabilities.
→ Ensured seamless cutover from SQL Server to Babelfish without disruption to existing T-SQL workflows.
Outcomes Expected
→ Automated 70% of the migration process, achieving an estimated 90% reduction in migration time compared to manual efforts.
→ Estimated to achieve a monthly operational database savings of approximately 77% by adopting Aurora PostgreSQL over RDS SQL Server, while maintaining performance.
→ Achieved 66% greater efficiency compared to migrations performed with GenAI without the use of Caylent Accelerate™.
→ Established robust and repeatable regression testing processes for future migrations.
Teamfront is a strategic partner to software companies. The organization champions founder-owned, home and field services companies that display potential in niche markets. By providing operational support, proven playbooks, and preserving their unique culture, Teamfront helps these companies level up and accelerate growth.
Among their portfolio is Arborgold, serving small to mid-sized green industry business owners with business management software, payment processing, and digital marketing solutions. To address rising SQL Server licensing costs and enhance database performance, Teamfront partnered with Caylent to migrate Arborgold’s SQL database clusters to Amazon Babelfish.
This migration, which would have been prohibitively costly and time-intensive if handled manually, was made possible by the utilization of Caylent’s GenAI-powered Caylent Accelerate™. Caylent Accelerate™ automated 70% of the migration process, including translating and testing stored procedures for performance with Amazon Babelfish and ensuring expected outcomes. Caylent’s experts promptly handled the remaining 30% of more complex translations, ensuring a seamless transition.
With Caylent Accelerate™, Teamfront significantly optimized the migration effort: Out of 2,500 stored procedures identified across five SQL Server clusters, Caylent Accelerate™ recognized and retired 1,850 as unused 'dead code,' immediately saving about two full days of manual effort. The remaining 650 stored procedures were migrated with remarkable efficiency. Nearly 70% were fully automated, requiring only three hours to complete, while the remaining 214 complex procedures were manually migrated in just over 220 hours.
Without Caylent Accelerate™, manually migrating and testing each stored procedure at an average pace of one procedure every four hours would have required roughly 2,600 hours. Caylent Accelerate™ reduced this cumulative migration effort to approximately 220 hours, achieving a time savings of over 90%. Even compared to other GenAI tools without Caylent Accelerate™’s optimization capabilities—which would take upwards of 650 hours—Caylent Accelerate™ proved to be 66% more efficient.
The result? Migrating from RDS SQL Server Standard Edition to Aurora PostgreSQL with Babelfish is on target to achieve cost savings of approximately 77% by eliminating expensive licensing, without sacrificing performance. The success of Arborgold’s migration has proven the value of Caylent Accelerate™, inspiring Teamfront to pursue similar modernization efforts across more of their portfolio companies.
Problem
Arborgold's reliance on SQL Server presented a significant challenge due to rising licensing costs and the need for improved performance.
The existing database infrastructure spanned five SQL Server clusters with over 2,500 stored procedures (SPs). Migrating this complex environment to Babelfish for PostgreSQL promised lower costs, better scalability, and enhanced performance. However, the scale of the migration, including translating thousands of SPs for Babelfish compatibility, presented a daunting technical and financial barrier.
For Teamfront, this migration was a proof of concept (POC) for broader modernization efforts across their portfolio companies. Without an efficient and cost-effective migration approach, the initiative risked stalling before demonstrating value.
Traditional manual migration methods were prohibitively expensive and time-intensive, making such an effort impractical. The complexity and cost of tackling this manually meant the project was effectively out of reach—until Caylent introduced its GenAI-powered Caylent Accelerate™.
"Caylent Accelerate™ gave us the velocity and precision we needed to turn a daunting, multi-cluster migration into a streamlined success. What would’ve taken thousands of hours was reduced to a fraction of the effort—without compromising performance or disrupting operations.
AWS’s investment in Caylent Accelerate™’s development speaks volumes about the potential of AI driven migrations, and we are excited to have benefited from that innovation. It’s exciting to see solutions like this accelerate adoption of modern, cloud-native databases across AWS.”
Bobby Land
Chief Product and Technology Officer
Solution
Leveraging GenAI with Caylent Accelerate™
To address the challenges of migrating Arborgold’s databases from SQL Server to Babelfish for PostgreSQL, Caylent deployed its GenAI-powered Caylent Accelerate™.
Caylent Accelerate™ automated 70% of the migration process, including retiring 1,850 unused procedures identified as 'dead code,' and automatically migrating over 430 of the remaining 650 active procedures, testing them for compatibility, and ensuring performance alignment with Babelfish. For the remaining 30% of stored procedures, which were too complex for full automation, Caylent’s technical experts promptly intervened to ensure performance optimization and compatibility. The GenAI-powered tool significantly reduced manual effort and expedited the identification of code requiring remediation.
To ensure a seamless migration, Caylent conducted rigorous regression testing on the translated stored procedures. This ensured that expected outcomes and performance standards were consistently met, eliminating potential risks to Arborgold’s critical operations.
Collaborative Delivery
Caylent facilitated regular discovery and knowledge-sharing sessions with Teamfront’s internal teams, ensuring alignment between both organizations. The engagement was uniquely structured, with both Caylent and Teamfront’s delivery teams working hand in hand under the same leadership strategy, creating a unified approach to the project.
This close collaboration enabled the teams to refine regression testing strategies, optimize workflows, and maintain a shared vision throughout the migration process. Caylent also provided tasking and technical guidance to Teamfront’s team, ensuring that deliverables were reviewed and validated with precision. This partnership-driven approach not only accelerated progress but also fostered a scalable modernization framework for future initiatives.
Optimizing Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL
Caylent guided Arborgold in preparing its production Babelfish cluster on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, optimizing the cluster for compatibility and performance, ensuring a seamless cutover from SQL Server.
Aurora PostgreSQL provides better performance utilizing AWS Graviton-based instances, further optimizing the efficiency and responsiveness of Arborgold’s database environment. Built-in managed failover and readable secondaries in Aurora also reduce operational risks, enhancing disaster recovery capabilities without additional cost or complexity.
Additionally, Babelfish ensures that Arborgold’s technical teams can seamlessly transition without retraining staff on new database languages, maintaining continuity in their existing T-SQL development processes and minimizing disruption to operations.
