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UK National Health Service Dumps Oracle For FOSS NoSQL

posted by n1 on Thursday September 11 2014, @05:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the anything-but-oracle dept.

gewg_ writes:

Ulitzer's Business Wire reports:

The Spine -- a collection of national applications, services, and directories -- connects clinicians, patients and local service providers throughout England to essential national services, such as electronic prescriptions and patient health records.

Spine is used by more than 20,000 organizations that provide health care across England, including primary and secondary care sites, pharmacies, opticians and dentists. Riak, the open source distributed database, is key to providing the reliability and scalability for the platform to drive efficiency and improve patient care.

The NHS' move to revamp the Spine, in a major project led by England's Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), was driven by the need for a scalable, resilient and flexible system that would also result in cost-savings for the organization.

With these requirements in mind, the NHS selected Riak Enterprise, the commercial version of Basho's distributed open source, highly available NoSQL database, to support the transition and implementation of the new Spine. Basho and the HSCIC collaborated throughout to ensure the technical knowledge of both organizations was reflected in enhancements to Riak and the wider project itself.

El Reg's coverage notes that the old system used a (closed-source, proprietary) Oracle product and the new software is NoSQL running on an open-source stack. It also notes the decision was made in October 2013.

Robert Pogson's commentary is also interesting.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday September 11 2014, @06:00AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 11 2014, @06:00AM (#91945) Journal
    Hipsters! What's wrong with COBOL?
    It's quite reliable and secure: there are COBOL systems running fine since '70-ies and ... have you ever heard about a case of "COBOL-injection attacks"?
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 3) by skullz on Thursday September 11 2014, @06:31AM

    by skullz (2532) on Thursday September 11 2014, @06:31AM (#91950)

    ... have you ever heard about a case of "COBOL-injection attacks"?

    No, because much like vampires, COBOL programs never actually die, they just rise to suck the life out of projects now and then. But no injections.

  • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11 2014, @07:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11 2014, @07:03AM (#91953)

    > Hipsters! What's wrong with COBOL?

    COBOL has been a read-only language for 30+ years now.
    Nobody writes anything new in COBOL anymore.

    • (Score: 2) by monster on Thursday September 11 2014, @02:32PM

      by monster (1260) on Thursday September 11 2014, @02:32PM (#92012) Journal

      Nobody starts new projects in COBOL anymore.

      FTFY. Dont' forget software maintenance.