Health research organization ensures data availability with SharePlex

Benefits

• Cost savings: Saves thousands in licensing fees by eliminating the need for a costlier replication tool and add-ons
• Scalability: Solves capacity limit issues
• Flexibility: Supports a planned phased migration to PostgreSQL
• Data accuracy: Provides near real-time data integration and supports customizable filtering

The Story

A pioneering research organization dedicated to advancing health required a new solution to meet its evolving data needs. Their work spans multiple disciplines, including aging, health sciences, biomedical informatics and public health research, with the ultimate goal of empowering people to end disease and realize true health through better information.

To support their mission, the organization relies on vast amounts of medical data sourced from a health information exchange. Ensuring the accuracy and availability of this data is crucial for generating impactful medical insights and supporting key stakeholders in the research community.

Data challenges

The organization faced a growing challenge: their research database, sourced from the exchange, was expanding to 50 terabytes. Maintaining real-time data synchronization without overwhelming their Oracle database required a robust solution. Initially, they relied on Oracle GoldenGate for data replication, but high licensing costs, complexity and lackluster support made it unsustainable.

“There’s an organizational boundary with the exchange,” explained their manager of infrastructure and operations. “So, all that operational data sits on their side of the boundary and our research data sits on another side of that boundary. When that wall was built, there was a realization that we needed to do something because we didn’t want the research happening in that production application database. So, a clone was created and then the discussion was, ‘Well, how do we keep that synchronized?’”

This was a pressing concern, as they began to run into more challenges with their data replication solution. “GoldenGate licensing terms became difficult, painful, and Oracle wanted us to upgrade to Enterprise Edition, which was way too costly for us. So, we had to look for a solution that also worked with Standard Edition, which was SharePlex.”

Easing the pain

With SharePlex^® by Quest^®, the organization gained an all-inclusive alternative to GoldenGate that delivers powerful data replication functionality at a fraction of the cost.

“We looked around and settled on SharePlex because we share a similar culture with Quest,” he said. “In terms of working with the SharePlex team, versus working with Oracle, I feel like I have a partner working with SharePlex. Working with Oracle often felt like I was working with an adversary.”

Along with culture, company size and costs were big factors in making the switch, and SharePlex fit the bill perfectly, providing a comprehensive offering with unrivalled functionality. “For the features specifically that we were using with Oracle GoldenGate, SharePlex best matched that feature set that we needed,” said their director of IT infrastructure and information security officer.

Seeing how easy it would be to implement SharePlex solidified their decision to rule out other options. “SharePlex implementation complexity was also lower than some of the other things we looked at,” their manager of infrastructure and operations added.

Replacing GoldenGate with SharePlex

With the help of a knowledgeable Quest expert, the organization transitioned from costly GoldenGate to cost-efficient SharePlex. “We implemented SharePlex ourselves with some support from Quest,” their infrastructure and operations manager said. “They walked us through both of our implementations. It’s a great team to work with.”

“Now, we use SharePlex to flow that operational continually updating data through that boundary to our research database, bridging that gap. And that has been our initial use case for SharePlex,” he explained. “Once the medical data is on our side of that boundary, we then use SharePlex for other use cases. That database that we have is big, which means it’s also problematic at times to do intensive research on because it’s just too big in performance. So, we use SharePlex to pull a subset of data out of that database into a smaller database that we can then use specifically for generating data through an ETL process into a standard medical informatics research format.”

“And having that compatibility between the organizations for us is critical,” added their director of IT infrastructure and information security officer.

A healthy infrastructure

With SharePlex, they can easily perform:

Oracle-to-Oracle replication: Ensuring data consistency between the operational exchange database and the research database

Oracle-to-PostgreSQL replication: Creating a lightweight reporting database for streamlined data analysis

One-way replication: Enabling real-time downstream data flow without complexity

Healing effects

With SharePlex, the organization now benefits from real-time replication, ensuring researchers have immediate access to critical data. “Most of the time, we’re almost instantaneous in our replication. I mean, it’s incredibly impressive,” their infrastructure manager noted.

That high level of data availability proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were able to analyze COVID data and provided some dashboards for the state as well as dashboards that were publicly available to look at COVID data. SharePlex made that data available to us,” he said.

Their IT director echoed that sentiment, saying, “There are certain projects where stakeholders certainly like and appreciate having that real-time data.”

A well-supported solution

Beyond the affordability, real-time data integration and multi-platform compatibility SharePlex provides, the organization has also been impressed with its support staff. “Quest support for SharePlex has been phenomenal,” their manager of infrastructure and operations said. “The responsiveness has been good. The knowledge of the team we’ve worked with has been really good.”

He went on to explain, “I felt like we were being heard when we said something. Sometimes when you deal with support, I have dealt with support from things in the past where I have asked a specific question and the answer that came back was clearly not for the question I asked. Or another software vendor once literally Googled the support request and sent me back the answers I had already found and that was bad. The team at SharePlex has always been very professional. They’ve always been very technically skilled. They’ve been responsive – a great team.” He added, “Quest has always been like working with a partner rather than a vendor. So that is something that I think is important to acknowledge.”

A highly recommended remedy

With SharePlex, they’ve successfully transformed their data operations, ensuring real-time data access for life-changing medical research while maintaining cost efficiency. “I would definitely say we would recommend SharePlex,” he said.

“Yeah, we definitely recommend SharePlex to other folks that we talk to,” their IT director agreed. “The overall experience working with Quest has been really positive. And the whole Oracle theme is a pretty known theme, as far as expenses and licenses go. And so everyone’s always looking at, ‘Well, how are we doing the replication and how successful is it for us? What kind of support does it require?’ And so I think we always have a good story to tell about SharePlex.”

The partnership with Quest is still going strong, as SharePlex supports their mission of supporting public health.