Belgian Police, Belgium
45,000 Belgian police rely on Caché to coordinate critical activities
A tragic crime in 1996, and its aftermath, resulted in sweeping reforms of Belgium’s police forces. New laws enacted in 1998 called for the consolidation of Belgium’s 196 independent municipal police zones (using a patchwork of information systems), the federal police (with its own information systems), and the Criminal Investigation Department into a single integrated force with two levels: federal and local police. The law also called for the federal police to create a single computing hardware and software architecture that all the forces would share. For the core data management and application infrastructure, the federal police chose Caché.
Eddy Muylaert, information technology director at the federal police, is overseeing
development of a new suite of Caché-based applications. These include
Transit, Investigation Management, and Money Transfer modules, with application
access through a secure Web portal. Caché also supports applications used
for day-to-day police department operations such as file management, human
resources, logistics, payroll, telephone directory, and other functions. When all
of these applications are fully deployed, “they will be used around the clock,
seven days a week, by our 45,000 agents from nearly 24,000 PCs,” says
Muylaert. “Our combination of Caché on Intel-based hardware running Red Hat
Linux is absolutely reliable and fast.”
“Our combination of Caché on Intelbased hardware running Red Hat Linux is absolutely reliable and fast.”
--Eddy Muylaert
Federal Police Information Technology Director
Belgian Police
The Investigation Management module gives investigators a broad overview of the elements of a case – bringing together information about the events, people, transportation, places, and other details in various formats – and supports cross-referencing and analysis on the data. “This application highlights how Caché’s innovative object-oriented nature enabled us to naturally model in the database how we work,” says Muylaert.
“Caché was not a conventional choice for us, in the sense that big name relational database technology is conventional,” Muylaert continues. “But Caché’s performance, reliability, and minimal hardware requirements were key for us, as was the ability to easily migrate data, metadata, and stored procedures the previous police forces’ Sybase and Informix databases into Caché.”
