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From: phil@osiris.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.databases
Subject: Re: Unix machines for large databases
Summary: real experience
Message-ID: <1598@osiris.UUCP>
Date: 12 May 88 19:48:18 GMT
References: <428@cmx.npac.syr.edu> <347@alice.marlow.reuters.co.uk>
Organization: Johns Hopkins Hospital
Lines: 62
Posted: Thu May 12 15:48:18 1988


Well, I promised this to a couple of people, so here it is.  Excuse the
cross-posting to comp.arch, but since I haven't heard anything from anyone
about "getting it the hell out of here", I'll assume that it's OK to leave
it for now.  Let me know (nicely, please) if this changes.

I posted a followup last week to an article from Bill O'Farrell of Syracuse
University, who was requesting info on maintaining large databases on UNIX
systems.  I mentioned that I was willing to discuss our experiences
privately with Bill.  Since then, several other people have sent me mail
asking that I either post or email more info on our applications, and I
noticed that there has been some interest in this topic from different
people, so here's a quick summary of what we're doing.  This report was
written with significant help from and ultimate approval of Dr. Steve
Kahane, who is currently our application development director.


We support a very heterogenous production environment at JHH.  In 1983 we
chose to network existing sub-systems using Ethernet and chose Sun's RPC
mechanism (using both TCP and XNS) for interprocess communication support.
Significant integration of an IBM MVS/CICS sub-system, several different
types of MUMPS sub-systems, and our UNIX sub-systems has been achieved.

Most of our new development has been in UNIX using C.  More specifically:

	UNIX production hardware: Pyramid 98xe and 9820 computers with lots
		of disk and main memory

	OS: Pyramid OSx (dual port of 4.2BSD and SysV.2)

	DBMS: Relational Technology INGRES (5.0/04a)

	Databases: Several, ranging from several MB to about 1.5 GB, with
		tables as large as 500 MB

	Avg. # of concurrent users: ~35 from UNIX machines (increasing
		rapidly), another 5-6 (and probably more) from non-UNIX
		clients

	UNIX production applications: Patient ID, patient demographics and
		history, emergency room, radiology scheduling, report
		transcription and lookup, radiology film tracking,
		outpatient clinic management and appointment scheduling,
		automated history report generation, and others

	IBM production: Pre-admission, Admission, Transfer & Discharge,
		Pharmacy, several financial sub-systems, and others

	MUMPS production: Laboratory Systems, Surgical Pathology, Oncology
		(OCIS), Library System, and several medical literature
		databases

(The above lists only those production systems that are integrated with our
databases over the network.)

If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask and I'll get more
precise info out ASAP.

                                                                 Phil Kos
                                                      Information Systems
...!uunet!pyrdc!osiris!phil                    The Johns Hopkins Hospital
                                                            Baltimore, MD