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UK's National Health Service Moves To NoSQL Running On an Open-Source Stack
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.
Obviously you have never worked with HL7. One message will have hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of data.
The "NoSQL means Not Only SQL" crap you're shitting out is nothing more than the NoSQL community frantically backtracking after their "NoSQL means No SQL" ideas were shown to be disastrous bunk.
Instead of owning up to the fact that they were horribly, horribly wrong, and made some really fucking stupid suggestions, the NoSQLers have just decided to change history. They pretend that they weren't saying what they very clearly said in the past. And they obviously need to admit that SQL and relational databases are the only viable option, but can't do this without looking like the fools that they are, so they admit that it's okay to use "sometimes". And this "sometimes" ends up being "all the time", but again, they can't openly say that without looking like the incompetents that they are.
Face it, "NoSQL" does mean "No SQL". It always has, and it always will. No amount of backtracking will change the fact that the NoSQL crowd was full of shit, and still is.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'm bored and can't help myself.
acid isn't so important when the unit is a patient's records. there is also no need for a rigid data model.
This is unbelievable. Holy fuck, I sure hope that you don't work with databases professionally. I hope you don't work with them as a hobby! Nobody with an ounce of intelligence and even a minute of working with data would ever consider saying something as utterly stupid as what you just said.
As someone who actually has worked with patient data in hospitals, he is pretty on the money regarding the non-structured nature of some patient records. Full ACID compliance is not that important in many cases, often a proper audit trail will suffice. It is similar to banking transactions, which are almost never ACID (despite being used in so many textbook examples of ACID compliance).
One difference between an amateur and professional is knowing how to balance a system's requirements and create a design that actually fit the system's needs. Strict adherence to some guidelines is just plain stupid.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I use the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) component of the spine and take issue with the successful claim. The upgrade has been appalling.
It was rolled out over the UK's August bank holiday, with no advance notification. After the holiday, prescriptions pulled down from the spine (they haven't implemented push messaging ... ) had invalid digital signatures, rendering them illegal. Prescriptions that had been completed and payment claimed for in Jan 14 were redownloaded from the spine. Post dated prescriptions for October also began appearing. These are only supposed to be downloadable on after the valid date for obvious reasons.
Not only was this a logistical nightmare, some issues are still broken after two weeks.
I am amazed that so many issues got through testing.
Utter shambles.
I have worked for a health insurer in UK that treated ACID compliance as a bonus, not a requirement. At the time I left them, they had a whole "data correction team" - 12 people working full-time to do live SQL queries to fix database inconsistencies. I wish I made this up, but it's real. If this is considered acceptable practice, I don't want to work in this industry ever again.