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UK's National Health Service Moves To NoSQL Running On an Open-Source Stack

Posted by Soulskill on from the deciding-to-DROP-it dept.

An anonymous reader sends this news from El Reg: The U.K.'s National Health Service 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-day monitoring period. Spine is the NHS’s main secure patient database and messaging platform, spanning a vast estate of blades and SANs. It logs the non-clinical information on 80 million people in Britain – holding data on everything from prescriptions and payments to allergies. Spine is also a messaging hub, serving electronic communications between 20,000 applications that include the Electronic Prescription Service and Summary Care Record. It processes more than 500 complex messages a second.

3 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Holy shit! by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is this a big IT project that actually worked? Where's my fainting couch???

  2. How quickly will they run back to Oracle? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't help but get the feeling that within a few months they'll be running back to Oracle or some other real database system.

    At this point, anyone who works with databases in industry knows that "NoSQL" has come to mean inconsistent data, corrupted data, and silently lost data.

    One just can't throw away atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability without running into some serious problems.

    And that's totally ignoring how it becomes damn near impossible effectively query NoSQL databases. Sorry, writing complex queries in some imperative subset of JavaScript is totally the wrong way of doing things. Intentionally not learning SQL takes more effort than learning how to use it!

  3. Re: Are you fucking serious? Tell me you aren't! by gaspyy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Do you even know what ACID means?

    Atomicity - either everything is committed or nothing is. I find it crucial to avoid inconsistent states.
    Consistency - data is valid in all states.
    Isolation - ensure that concurrent transactions work correctly.
    Durability - no data is lost due to software crashes or power failures

    How could these not be important for banking is beyond me.