Relational DBs rev up for high-end TP - transaction processing in client/server environments tests the limits of relational technology - includes a related article on whether the two-tier client/server architecture is sufficient for large-scale online transaction processing

Software Magazine, Oct, 1995 by Barbara Francett

Imonics Corp., Morrisville, N.C., a systems integration company, has been using Encina for about a year as it migrates legacy systems to an enterprise client/server environment for its parent company, Medaphis Corp. Medaphis provides medical billing for hospitals and hospital-based physicians.

"A year ago, Medaphis had 300 offices with 50 different versions of Pick-based billing, check processing and customer service applications, running on NCR Towers," said Mark Heffley, Imonics' vice president, new opportunities. "The legacy systems had mountains of paper. Medaphis went through a lot of growth, and we had to u grade capacity to use enterprise-size systems."

Heffley, who was the project leader, and his associates decided a three-tier application approach, using a TP monitor, was necessary. "With a two-tier approach, you can't get past a certain number of users. We also wanted to use standard products and be database-neutral," he said. Medaphis currently uses Sybase, which Heffley says "works fine," but Imonics plans to add other DBMSs in the future.

After considering several TP monitors, as well as RDBMS vendor solutions, Imonics chose Transarc's Encina. "Transarc, with its support for emerging OSF [Open Software Foundation] and DCE [Distributed Computing Environment] standards, seemed to be going where we wanted to go. We could do the same things with the database [alone], but [that solution] would be proprietary. Encina gives us an integration platform with access to other databases," Heffley said.

Since then, Imonics has designed and developed a comprehensive medical billing and collection system built with Encina-based applications servers, Heffley said. The system, which has reduced 50 different billing systems to five, spanning some 1,500 workstations, is just beginning to go into production. "We've built a technical infrastructure for building applications in a consistent way. Our strategy is to layer in the technical infrastructure, add simple applications, and then add more complex applications," Heffley said.

"Distributcd TP monitors give us all the tools we need to build a very large-scale system," he added. "We can do, with TP monitors, what ran on mainframes a few years ago. Then, that was the only way, but that's not the case anymore."

Kaiser Permanente, a Portland, Ore.-based health maintenance organization, has found another alternative for large-scale, client/server OLTP -- Open M from InterSystems Corp., Cambridge, Mass. Open M has a large central database, and can also be distributed to local file servers. The product is used chiefly in the healthcare field, because that industry characteristically has loosely associated, disparate data. But there's no reason why it couldn't be used in other types of businesses, according to one Open M user.

"The nice thing about Open M is that you can get a lot of transactions quickly without resultant overhead," said Gary Huscher, application group manager at Kaiser. "[Other DBMS solutions] consume machine resources and require a lot of people to support them."