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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: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday September 11 2014, @08:11AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 11 2014, @08:11AM (#91963) Journal

    and NoSQL explicitly scraps those guarantees in exchange for better performance on large data sets.

    Not necessarily: there are NoSQL-es [wikipedia.org] (immediately consistent) and then, again, there are NoSQL-es [wikipedia.org] (eventually consistent).
    In particular, TFA states:

    Spine1 has been completely rebuilt and Oracle’s relational database jettisoned for a NoSQL distributed system called Riak, from Basho.

    Wikipedia says Riak is "eventually consistent" and that is used by 25% of the Fortune 50 [wikipedia.org] (which means: if it's good for multibillion transnationals, should be good enough for low-end matters such as brits health-care - after all, a life is valued at max $7.9M in US [wikipedia.org]).

    Ah, BTW, the system that is using Riak, TFA says:

    loads such as those stuffed into massive, mission-critical systems like Spine.

    (with my emphasis). Now, there's a difference between mission critical [wikipedia.org] and life critical [wikipedia.org] (I infer that, while a failure within NHS may become unpleasant, it is unlikely that will cause loss of life).

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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday September 11 2014, @10:40AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Thursday September 11 2014, @10:40AM (#91979)

    I infer that, while a failure within NHS may become unpleasant, it is unlikely that will cause loss of life

    This is probably incorrect. I don't know exactly what they're storing on there, but things like medical triage really are matters of life and death, and software failures in this area really have caused loss of life in the past.

    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday September 11 2014, @10:50AM

      by Wootery (2341) on Thursday September 11 2014, @10:50AM (#91981)

      Having gone back and actually read the summary....

      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.

      The patient health records sounds like the important bit here. I imagine there could be some consequences to this stuff failing, but I suspect you're right that it wouldn't generally result in death, but instead in an Error 404.

      The consequences of the system getting hacked could be very severe, if they really are hooking up patient health records to a widely-accessible database...