NHS grows a NoSQL backbone and rips out its Oracle Spine The NHS has ripped the Oracle backbone from a national patient database system and inserted NoSQL running on an open-source stack. Spine2 has gone live following successful redevelopment including redeployment on new, x86 hardware. The project to replace Spine1 had been running for three years with Spine2 now undergoing a 45- …
Agreed, though from the admittedly fuzzy description, it sounds like it's a simple document store rather than a database. That would explain having Tornado and RabbitMQ in the mix.
If things do start to go wrong, it should be easy enough to move to Postgres hstore or jsonb and get some of the reliability back.
>> I'd not have put reliability on the NoSQL list.
Depends on the complexity and temporality of the data. SQL is all too often a golden hammer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hammer). Massively distributed message-oriented systems, such as Spine2 appears to be, can make ACID impossible (for a given level of performance, anyway).
All design is compromise. Software design is doubly so. (Apologies to Douglas Adams)
I don't hate Microsoft, I don't hate Oracle, I'm just miffed that this happened under a Conservative government, and that it was Nullabor who were in bed with Microsoft and the US consultancies.
Kudos, though, to Richard Bacon, the Conservative MP who spent so much time on the PAC going on about Government IT wastage and incompetence (as well as voting against the Iraq war). This is what he said in 2011:
I'm surprised, your surprised, about the Tories. I'm no fan, but Tory policy is and always has been to cut Government spending, so it is pretty much in line with that.
Labour have always been the bigger government party.
If your a middle earner, you're still screwed whoever you vote for, so from that side it makes little difference.
The problem with the Tories, is that they normally save money by robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Such as cutting the government's cost by increase in the cost for local councils instead.
Such as cutting government's borrowing by using PFI, which is still borrowing but through private channels meaning it's not counted as "government debt".
- Really? So what other way is there to save money. Look - unless you are New Labour who just get to imagine money that doesn't exist in order to buy votes, then 'Robbing Peter to Pay Paul' - or - 'Managing Funds' is how stuff gets paid for. There is only so much money in circulation, you starve one budget (Peter) to feed another (Paul) as and when required. If you have any financial responsibility in your day-to-day life then you 'rob Peter to pay Paul' every day - ie: 'Can't go for a curry with the lads tonight because the car insurance is due' or 'Will pay to get the guttering cleared to avoid paying damage due to damp'.
Honestly - how else do you think budgets get managed other than Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.
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Failed, runiously expensive, overly ambitious, poorly defined, mis-managed government (especially NHS/defence) initiatives with endlessly deep pockets of public funding is what keeps the IT industry afloat - both parties agree to walk away, nothing has to be delivered, no harm done, but lots of lovely dinners and educational *events* have been shared - everybody (who isn't a Tax payer wins)...
....for going Open Source but they really should have looked at Postgress. They probably could have saved more by simply migrating to Intel/AMD and keeping Oracle instead of re-writing everything, unless it's a fairly trivial system in which case it was over specified to start with.
I can't image that they spent 3 years on this and didn't consider all the options, they must be a pretty savvy bunch if you read the other articles about this. I assume that the Riak system they built was the best option in this case.
I also doubt any system where peoples lives are at risk would be considered trivial.
Why does anyone think that moving from one DB technology to another is difficult? Any (reasonably) modern application should be designed with an abstraction layer to translate between different vendor DBs. When the SW licencing costs from the like of Oracle for these scale of DBs amounts to many £M, then the relative cost of migrating from one DB to another is likely to be tiny. Plus the proven ability to change vendor puts the user in a very strong position to negotiate favourable licencing terms. Most commercial apps use pretty generic SQL, migrating from say Oracle to DB2 is less difficult than you think - be brave - give your DB supplier a hard time, there are lots of options out there and the likes of Oracle know very well that the genie will soon be out of the bottle.
There are probably good reasons they dropped Oracle (aside from the high cost):
1. relational databases are good if you have lazy administrators - but all those views and joins come at a high cost.
2. their primary need was for a key-value system, which can be much more efficiently done without SQL. This will increase their price-performance point by a substantial margin.
3. if they had any sort of distributed requirements, they are much better off rolling their own (simply by adding a field to hold the date/time a record was updated and writing their own replication engine) - in tests I heard of using Oracle replication, it wasn't possible to replicate to more than 7 hosts before network overhead (of ACID transactions I suspect?) killed the system. Dropping ACID and using a custom replication engine (which wasn't very expensive) fixed the problem
I don't know of your spreading FUD for the sake of it or you are simply misguided.
1. RDBMSs are good because administration isn't onerous.
2.Not sure what your point is. Keys are a useful way to access data and make sense of it. They perform very well.
3. I can't comment on Oracle replication as I haven't used it but I have seen other RDBMSs replicate to over 200 remote sites. ACID really isn't that costly and I've often seen even average site manage thousands of ACID transaction a second which is unlikely to be needed in the case in the article. In memory databases up that again, to the point it is no longer a limiting factor even in the most exteme of applications.
Multi-master SQL databases to 200+ sites with full ACID, really? Master-slave, I get, master-master for all sites, I really am having a hard time believing.
Furthermore, RDBMS administration isn't onerous, but it's not easy either (and it's certainly a specific skill-set). A lot of NoSQL databases are much easier to administer, and can be administered by standard SA's, not DB SA's. You can get a multinode, fully HA Riak cluster up in literally 3 minutes and start transacting against it. Dynamically adding and removing nodes in that cluster also can happen on the fly. I'd like to see any classical RDBMS do that.
"for going Open Source but they really should have looked at Postgress"
They might as well have used MSSQL server if that was the case - it has a lot fewer security holes and a lot more functionality for a start. The clear thing here is that the database doesn't really do much other than act as a big indexed file store - so crappy and limited feature products like No SQL can do the job...
@AC
>They might as well have used MSSQL server if that was the case - it has a lot fewer security holes and a lot more functionality for a start.
ROFLMAO
Did you even read the article ?
1. They want to save money
2. They said RDBMS is overkill
BTW, nobody in their right mind would consider MSSQL for anything
If they wanna save even more, when are they ditching Windows ?
also lucky to hear a british accent amongst a lot of the doctors and nurses in many urban hospitals.
This can be issue when are attempting to understand how life threatening an illness is from medical staff. I really didn't need any additional stress when my wife had our two kids, and they "forgot" to give her any food for dinner on one occasion despite her asking a number of times!
I don't care where people come from, is the level of service I worry about!
"It logs the non-clinical information on 80 million people in Britain"
Er, what? This country only has a population of 64.1 million (http://ons.gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Population)
Surely you can't account for another ~16 million records from births/deaths turnover, duplicate records, health tourists, etc ??
> ... so Riak must be more expensive than SQL/Server then...
On the reasoning that the "cheapness" quotient of Oracle's stuff must be negative? Does seem like the only remotely coherent interpretation :-|
Methinks English is not the author's native tongue.
"It processes more than 500 complex messages a second."
There are some 36,000 GPs in the country, seeing an average of one patient every 12 minutes; making a total of 50 patients per second. That's an order of magnitude less than the number of messages per second that the system is processing. What are all these messages?
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