The British Columbia Ministry of Health in Vancouver had to do something. The DB2-based mainframe's database querying performance was not keeping up with the changes wrought by decentralization, which started in 1992 and broadened health care control from a single official to a committee of doctors, nurses, citizens and ministry officials.
"We were getting questions from a wider audience and not meeting our clients' needs very well," said Jesse Davis, MPP project manager at the ministry. The wait just to get queries written was sometimes as long as a month, he added. Extracting and analyzing claims and payment records on the province's 3.3 million residents could take another week, and some complex queries were simply withdrawn because they would have taken even longer to complete.
Enter MPP in the form of MasPar Computer Corp.'s MP-2 system. The MasPar machine, combined with SAS Institute Inc.'s SAS System data access and analysis software, performed significantly faster than the mainframe on a series of query benchmarks devised by the Ministry of Health last year.
PERSUADING MANAGEMENT
However, persuading ministry officials to swallow the MPP medicine was not a simple task, especially with MasPar's small size and its lack of a proven track record in commercial environments. "I myself had never heard of MasPar before being assigned to this project," acknowledged Bruce Tyshynski, senior manager and adviser on the MPP program.
The concerns were not out of line considering the recent failures of MPP vendors Thinking Machines Corp. and Kendall Square Research Corp. MasPar has also been buffeted by the increased competition and flattened U.S. government demand that drove its rivals out of the hardware business, said Gary Smaby, president of Smaby Group Inc. in Minneapolis.
"They've suffered the slings and arrows along with their competitors," Smaby noted. MasPar's sales have been stuck at about the $20 million mark, leading to senior management changes, layoffs and a reduction in the vertical markets it targets from 12 to three, he added. But the move away from "a shotgun approach" may give the company a viable chance to survive as a niche vendor, he said.
SYSTEM-BACK GUARANTEE
Tyshynski said he found a sponsor from outside the information systems department to help sell the ministry on the MPP project. He was also able to show a three-year payback on the investment, which was a requirement "because of the nervousness about using this technology," he added.
As a final bit of insurance, Tyshynski persuaded BC Systems Corp., which handles data processing for the provincial government, to agree that the Ministry of Health could revert to database querying on the mainframe for free if the MasPar system was not up to snuff. "It was a basic put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is proposition," he said.
Final approval of the project came early this year, and the 4,096-processor MP-2 went online in August. The ministry currently has about 40G bytes of data stored in flat files on the MP-2, representing 185 million claim records from the past four years, according to Davis. The system is front-ended by a Digital Equipment Corp. DEC 5000 workstation, which channels data updates from the mainframe to the MP-2 and also runs the SAS software.
MOSTLY POSITIVE REPORT
The prognosis after the first four months of system use was generally positive, although some complications that require further attention have arisen, Davis said.
Most queries run on the MP-2 in less than 30 minutes, allowing the ministry's 20 research officers to do "in a day or a half-day what used to take them a week," from writing a query to analyzing the extracted data, he said. As a result, they can look at individual claims and client profiles much more readily than before.
The SAS software also lets the research officers write more queries on their own rather than having to ask the IS department for coding help, Davis added.
"The research officers can now do their jobs, and the systems people are back to doing systems stuff," he said.
On the flip side, though, SAS is "a huge product," and training the research officers to use it has been a challenge in some cases, Davis noted. "A lot of change was thrown on their shoulders," and the users are still "anywhere from being experts to being able to muddle through," he said.
In addition, large and complex queries can still take seven or eight hours to run on the MP-2, "and some we just don't do because they take too long," he said. The ministry has indeed turned back to the mainframe, in some cases as a result of the slow performance on big jobs.
MasPar and BC Systems are trying to tune the MP-2 for better throughput on complex sorts and look-ups, Davis said. The ministry also hopes to get a performance boost by moving the SAS software to a separate Digital workstation once a DEC OSF/1 version of SAS is available in the next month or so.
"We're pushing the envelope more with the system, and we're encountering the issues of ramping it up," Davis said. "We're doing a lot of things that we couldn't do before, but we want to do more."
Reprinted by permission from Computerworld magazine, Dec. 5, 1994 issue.
CUT TO THE QUICK
Results of query benchmarks written by the British Columbia Ministry of Health to compare IBM mainframe and MasPar MPP performance
Benchmark # of rows MVS/DB2 sp MasPar sp
Table data 260 mil. 16 hrs 19 min.
by category
Extract record 148 mil. 24 hrs 49 min.
from database
Three-way 8,000 10 sec. 3 sec.
join of multiple
tables
Two-step 46,000 2 min. 6 sec.
extraction of data
from larger records
