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DNRD’s online application procedures back to normal

DUBAI — The Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department (DNRD) have announced that online application procedures, which faced a slowdown during the New Year holiday, are now fully operational.

System analysts from Oracle and engineers from the DNRD have fixed the bugs in the Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) application server on which some of DNRD’s online procedures reside. The debugging of the application server was delayed due to the extended New Year holidays.

Despite the insistence of the DNRD that they were accepting manual services, tourist and travel agents who contacted the newspaper said this was not the case. The DNRD said it had processed in its over-the-counter services 20,524 visa applications from January 1-3. The DNRD’s online service during the same period processed 5,717 applications. In December 2005, the DNRD had processed 239,713 online and 309,217 over-the-counter visa related applications.

Over the past week, the DNRD was migrating its online procedures to the new RAC-based engine, to add newly devised services to its customers, and had rolled back its online services to the back-up systems during the operation. The DNRD’s new services enable the users to scan and attach all the documents required for visa and residency formalities, along with the online application form.

More than 10,000 companies and entities are registered to use the DNRD’s online system, which at its peak usage logs over 100,000 users transacting in various visa and residency related procedures. The DNRD’s IT infrastructure, based on IBM hardware and Oracle software solutions, is robust and highly scalable and has in place several mechanisms for mitigating data and service latency and load factor distribution. The DNRD’s customer-centric remittance ensures that all its customers and users are provided with advance notice regarding service scale-downs related to system maintenance, upgradation or migration.