Egide Informatique, a Paris-based company providing a comprehensive solution for real estate management, was in search of a reliable, high-performing database that would not require maintenance by a database administrator (DBA). Their software encompasses the commercial, residential, and social housing and addresses the needs of property administrators, co-ownership trustees, and property managers through its modular set of features. They have a wide-ranging base of 500 customers who can have anywhere from one to 200 workstations each, with some not even having an IT system in place. The challenge was to find a database solution that could cater to this diverse customer base, ensuring high performance and reliability without the need for constant maintenance.

TE21, an education company, was facing challenges due to its growth and the development of more complex business processes. They were outgrowing their manual QuickBooks solution and needed a more robust and automated process. The company also needed a CRM system that could enable a true “quote–to–cash” process starting with sales, which could be easily connected to their financial billing, collection, and reporting system. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the growing business's challenges.

Lufthansa Systems, a leading IT service provider for the airline and transportation markets, needed a robust and stable database platform to underpin its airline planning and routing software. This software is sold to hundreds of airlines globally to ensure every flight is a safe one. The company offers a modular range of products and services to manage all aspects of airline operations and planning. The challenge was to provide real-time availability of data, high levels of uptime, reliability and stability, cost-effective licensing, and vendor support.

AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd. is the United Kingdom’s leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and services to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors. With more than 4,000 employees, 19 distribution warehouses in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, and more than 2.6 million products delivered daily, the company relies on an enterprise-class IT infrastructure to support its large-scale logistical operations. At the same time, in its highly regulated and constantly-changing market, AAH must also maintain the agility to respond quickly and efficiently to emerging business requirements. The company’s role as an intermediary between suppliers and end customers brings additional complexity to the challenge; each business application used and each link in the value chain must perform optimally to maintain competitive advantage.

Algonquin College, based in Ottawa, Ontario, offers over 100 courses of study to more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students. The college's mission statement includes incorporating technology to improve service delivery and exceed client expectations. Advanced technology drives services for students, faculty, and employees, providing them with wireless and web-based access to curriculum, self-service, and student information. In 1993, when developing its technology-based services, Algonquin knew it needed to invest in a high-performance, transaction-oriented database that would scale. They chose Ingres, and today, the college continues to run mission-critical student and faculty applications on Ingres open source technology.

Askews Library Systems provides libraries around the world with complete services including selection support, buying, cataloguing, physical preparation for lending, promotional support, and management reporting. The libraries market within which Askews provides these services has become increasingly sensitive in recent years as economic pressures cap and in some cases depress spending. Four other companies compete with Askews in the £90m-a-year UK market, where contracts are awarded by competitive tender. Over the past decade, these pressures led the 130-yearold Askews to embrace state-of-the-art technology and process automation, including using the Web to market globally and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to serve customers world-wide. In addition, the company undertook the development of a bespoke e-procurement system.

China Telecom, managing a customer base of 250 million ADSL subscribers, was facing a significant challenge with its existing database system. The company's applications relied on the ADSL subscriber database to provide real-time access to hundreds of thousands of account objects. The subscriber database was deployed on a relational database management system (RDBMS), which required a high-performance server that was expensive to maintain. The system was proving too cumbersome over time to keep up with the company’s growing customer base. The company needed a solution that could handle as many as 480,000 queries and 1,000 update transactions per second at peak times, with database performance and reliability being top priorities.

The challenge faced by Comsoft was to ensure highly available access to the database for business-critical applications. In 2009, German Air Traffic Control (DFS) counted more than 2.9 million flights according to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the airspace of the Federal Republic of Germany alone. Air traffic management deploys cutting edge technology to control and regulate whether planes are maintaining the necessary safe distance from one another in controlled airspace, that they are on the right course and flying at the correct altitude and speed. It uses special air traffic management systems, instrument landing systems, and radar and navigation systems to enable fast and accurate processing of huge data volumes, thus ensuring the smooth flow of traffic. The wealth of different data processing systems in Europe, has led EUROCONTROL, the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, to take steps towards harmonizing European Air Traffic Management.

Today’s emerging HPC applications must handle complex and large volumes of data, which if not managed appropriately, may result in a serious performance bottleneck. CRL (Computational Research Laboratories Ltd.), a TATA Group company, was looking for a database engine running on a highly scalable Linux cluster. The company needed a solution that could offer sustained performance of complex analytics in the face of increasing data and seamless performance-oriented scalability of elastic database services underpinned by a tensile computing infrastructure.

The German Energy Management Act prescribes that a smart meter for power and gas, which is read at least every 15 minutes to provide tariff information, is mandatory for every new building or every energy-conserving renovation. The data volumes that are aggregated in modern power meters and transmitted to utility companies surpass the previous amount of data by a factor of 35,000. Utilities need an appropriate IT infrastructure to manage and process such data volumes if they opt for an in-house smart meter solution. While larger utilities can afford this, it represents a huge investment for smaller energy providers such as local public utilities.

The Department of Education and Training in Western Australia (WA DET) was facing a challenge with its back-end computing environment. The department managed a range of administrative activities to support programs delivered by 11 colleges and 8,000 staff throughout the state. The systems collectively managed over 1 million student records with 120,000 students processed through the state’s training systems annually. However, regional locations had to manage their own back-end environments, which imposed an expensive support burden on WA DET staff and vendor support engineers. Proprietary Unix server environments, often built on a variety of hardware models of differing ages, had to be managed remotely, along with the complex applications they were running. With many DET colleges hundreds of kilometers apart, it had become too expensive and cumbersome to maintain this computing environment.

Deutsche Familienversicherung AG (DFV AG), a leading insurance company based in Germany, was facing challenges with the growth of data in the insurance sector. The speed and stability of a database had become major factors, especially when it came to analyzing and reporting on corporate figures and, ultimately, customer satisfaction. As its master data had grown considerably over the years and also increased in complexity, DFV AG was looking for a stable and future-proof database that would also easily accommodate further growth. As part of its strategy, DFV AG uses commercial Open Source solutions for Business Intelligence (BI) and ETL. Representing the third technology layer in the IT stack, DFV sought to find a reliable database software solution that would then fit in with the existing IT infrastructure and hardware environment.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Telescope, stationed at Noordwijk (The Netherlands), is constantly bombarded by infrared radiation, high-energy particles from solar eruptions and other events in outer space. The telescope, which is carrying the largest telescope ever flown, collects an average of six to seven gigabit raw telemetry data every day. The data is managed in an onboard storage facility and downloaded during a daily three-hour window to one of two satellite stations on the ground. The data is then transmitted to the ESA satellite control center in Darmstadt, Germany, and forwarded to the scientific control center in Madrid, Spain. On previous ESA missions, the teams responsible for the in-flight instruments had to use a multitude of tools to analyze critical instrument data extracted from various files.

The challenge was the rapidly growing number of users simultaneously accessing the same TV programs and channels via Internet. In this application domain, the database must provide fast access to rather complex data, easy integration into an ever evolving application code, and support massive concurrent access from potentially millions of consumers. The Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IPTV Ecosystem was in need of a database system that could handle these demands efficiently.

Geological Data Design (GDD) was facing the challenge of efficiently collecting, managing, and analyzing large volumes of exploration and mining data. The data collected during the day from various field instruments, GPS, and cameras often integrated into a very large database, in some cases hundreds of millions or even billions of records. This made it difficult for geologists to quickly analyze large volumes of sample data for complex scenarios such as project timings, cash flows, and profitability with greater sensitivity levels.

GROUPE ADEO, a leading international home improvement retailer, was dealing with huge data volumes aggregated across the group's datamarts due to its extensive market presence. The company had hundreds of stores, multiple retail concepts, thousands of product references, and millions of sales translations made every day. Despite the company's experience of using Business Intelligence across this wide range of data, GROUPE ADEO was looking for an agile analytical database to complement its existing environment. The companies in the group needed a more affordable and user-friendly solution.

The Chemicals Regulations Directorate (CRD) of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was in the process of splitting its two main websites into two separate IP addresses. The first, public-facing website was to be moved to a third-party hosting provider. However, CRD needed to find a hosting provider who could provide a managed environment for its second secure site that also included the management of Actian Ingres and OpenROAD. As a result, CRD needed more than just a simple hosted Windows environment. A number of criteria had to be taken into account: the future of the existing in-house environment provider was unsure, the approach to outsourcing the secure website had to be low risk as the whole area of support for hardware and environment was under review, and the managed service had to be controlled yet flexible enough to allow CRD staff access when necessary.

Indra Sistemas, a global technology company, was tasked with building the control centers for Spain’s AVE high-speed bullet train system. The company needed a database that could handle the complex and demanding architecture of the integrated high-speed train control system (IRC). The system was designed from a global perspective, integrating information and control from each of the elements that make up a high-speed rail line. The architecture used by Indra includes three areas of management allowing for different degrees of accessibility and control of the line. The Real-time System Control Framework consists of over 30,000 objects in memory and 30 classes, with 80 TB of information eventually flowing into Oracle’s relational database on the corporate level.

INIT is a leading supplier of Intelligent Transportation Systems and Electronic Ticketing Systems for public transportation. Their application components place significant demands on concurrency, availability, and runtime performance. They were looking for a database technology that could efficiently store and retrieve complex real-time data in 24/7 operation. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle complex networked data and real-time requirements. The solution needed to be scalable, flexible, and capable of transparent data distribution and replication.

Medical Data Vision (MDV) develops management support software for hospitals and private health clinics throughout Japan. The MDV analyzer is an Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) service that collects and shares medical data from hospitals across Japan. The MDV analyzer aims to improve the quality of medical care by analyzing and sharing medical results with Pharmaceutical companies for epidemiological studies, market research and further drug development. MDV’s previous EBM required an upgrade due to slow performance. “Our previous application used another column type database and performance was taking up to 30 seconds for a report on 2 years of data,” said Hirai-san. “This was unacceptable, so over a 2 month period we evaluated 5 other high performance databases to see which offered the best performance.”

Northrop Grumman was tasked with developing a next-generation simulation application, the Cloud Depiction and Forecast System II (CDFS II), for the U.S. Air Force. The application needed to deliver results six times faster and with four times higher resolution than the previous system. The challenge was to program complex algorithms using object-oriented programming techniques. The previous system could only create a 48-hour forecast every six hours and a nine-hour forecast on request. The new system needed to improve on these capabilities.

Bot Colony is a massive multiplayer game developed by North Side Inc., a progressive MMO game developer located in Canada. The game leverages breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is extremely intensive in terms of CPU requirements. The player converses with the game’s characters in English to solve a mystery and conduct missions. The NLP component is extremely intensive in terms of its CPU requirements, requiring access to vast amounts of data for linguistic processing and reasoning. The system database contains both linguistic data and a large store of world knowledge, represented as formal axioms. North Side became interested in Versant Object Database when it ran into a programming bottleneck, consisting of serialization and deserialization of data with MySQL.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado is conducting research on the impact of global warming. The project, titled 'Data Rods: Enabling Time-Series Analysis of Massive Multi-Modality Cryospheric Data', is focused on the Greenland ice sheet. The challenge was to process billions of time-series information in real-time to enable a time-centric change analysis of data. The database for the project contains over 10 billion persistent objects. Indexed queries to the database can span millions of data rods simultaneously across time and space and must achieve response times of only a few seconds. Using a relational database was completely impractical due to the large size of the data sets and required response time.

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners in Ireland, responsible for the assessment and collection of taxes and duties, required high availability and high performance for its mission-critical computer systems. It had adopted the Ingres database and the OpenROAD application development toolset in 1993 and had constantly upgraded to the latest versions to ensure a stable, manageable, and economical platform. However, the organization faced challenges in improving transaction processing as well as better batch and checkpoint performance. It was essential to move mission-critical systems to Actian Ingres database without any impact on live services. The organization had many databases in multiple Ingres installations, all of which support mission-critical applications either in production or at various stages of development. It was essential to have minimal downtime during the upgrade and to ensure that all applications, especially its large-scale batch applications, continued to run smoothly.

Sheetz, a rapidly growing convenience store chain in the U.S., was facing the challenge of managing and analyzing increasing volumes of data from multiple sources. The company needed to optimize costs, maintain high quality, and ensure a positive customer experience. As data volumes continued to grow, Sheetz recognized the need to switch from a more expensive platform to a more cost-effective and efficient one that could handle the increasing data and provide actionable insights. The company was also looking to expand its data analysis from one year to two years, which equates to approximately three billion rows of data. Furthermore, Sheetz was anticipating its data to double over the next two to three years.

Siemens Industry Automation was tasked with providing a scalable solution for the automation of batch processes in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and food & beverage industry. The solution needed to ensure high product quality, production performance over time, complete traceability of production, quick response to market conditions, and efficient use of production equipment. The challenge was to find a database technology that would optimally match the requirements of the SIMATIC® BATCH program design, which provides an object-oriented view on models, procedures, and recipes for comprehensive batch processes. The system needed to be stable, performant, and capable of handling large database files up to double-digit Gigabytes in size. It also needed to provide fast and reliable real-time access to prevent any significant delay, failure, or shutdown that could potentially affect product quantity and quality.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) was faced with the challenge of rapidly expanding its database functionality and capacity to accommodate the increasing number of subjects and students. The agency needed to maximize the system’s development agility to offer new functionality in response to growing user expectations. The agency was also expanding to new markets in China, the Caribbean, and beyond, which required robust performance and open source flexibility.

Softwear BV, a SaaS solution provider for retailers, was facing challenges with its legacy database system. The poor performance and functionality of the system were unable to meet the analytical needs of its customers. As the database tables grew from millions of records to potentially billions, the transactional-based database solution could not keep up with the analytic demands from the customers. Furthermore, Softwear wanted to streamline the applications and reduce the amount of hardware needed in its data centers. The company also aimed to offer the analytic reporting layer as a SaaS-based on-demand online solution.

Sony Creative Software was facing a challenge with their Blu-ray authoring software, Blu-print. The software was built using object-relational mapping (ORM) technology, which was not scaling as required. The production of a Blu-ray disc can involve as many as 200,000 objects, demanding a fast and reliable database capable of handling an equal number of complex object relationships. Additionally, the emerging Blu-ray specification was in flux, and every change to the spec required a corresponding adjustment to the data model and database schema. Whenever a change was required to the data model, a time-consuming process ensued, requiring the export of all data to XML, updating and migrating the schema, and then reimporting the data.

TNT Express Services was in need of a reliable partner who could not only provide robust technology for building business applications, but also a qualified team of IT professionals who could support them by developing, running, and maintaining their applications. The company was looking for a solution that could help them track high-value items shipped by two of their divisions: Technology Express, which distributed IT and computing equipment, and Retail Express, now Fashion Group, which distributed high-end clothing from manufacturers to High Street outlets. Over time, the need for the system expanded to cover all items shipped by TNT Express.