Swiss and Egyptian governments join forces with Red Cross to build Caché application
Key Benefits
- High Performance
- Scalability
- ODBC
When the Swiss and Egyptian governments collaborated to build one national and eight regional blood transfusion centers throughout Egypt, there was no doubt in the project leaders' minds which database they wanted supporting the application. Caché, the world's leading database in healthcare, was the only database that could meet the myriad of short and long-term requirements that the project demanded.
The Blood Transfusion System (BTS) application was designed as a part of the National Blood Transfusion Service, a project that enhances and modernizes the current Egyptian healthcare system. Up until the service was implemented, there was no centralized, national repository for blood. If a patient needed a blood transfusion, family members would donate. A task force was supervised by the Swiss Red Cross and supported by the World Health Organization to oversee the project.
"We had serious concerns about performance, scalability, and the ability of the different sites to access the database," explained Marc Schild, the project leader from Cobra Software AG, the Swiss-based VAR responsible for the blood bank application. "We knew Caché would deliver the performance and scalability needed to access all nine networked sites. Caché supports ODBC, which interfaces with Crystal Report, the report generator we were using. And, of course, we needed a technology that would easily support the Arabic language, which Caché can do because of its Unicode feature."
"We knew Caché would deliver
the performance and scalability needed
to access all nine networked sites."
--Marc Schild
Cobra Software AG
The decision was made to take a character-based lab system that Cobra already had implemented and port the application's blood bank module to Caché. A Web interface built with Caché Server Pages (CSP) would give all nine sites a common interface. CSP is Caché's object-oriented Web development technology that gives developers high-speed Web access. CSP is compatible with all major Web servers, and boosts performance and scalability by offloading business logic processing to the powerful Caché data servers. Centralized application logic enables fast and easy application changes.
BTS was designed for simplicity; the project leaders wanted each center to run by itself. Caché requires much fewer resources than other technologies, and unlike relational databases that can sometimes need a staff of DBAs to keep them running, there are some Caché customers who do not use database administrators at all.
Each blood center has an NT server and runs Windows 98 on standard PCs. Schild predicts that the application's database will grow to very large proportions. "For example, in Alexandria, we inputted 1,000 donations in one month. That's not a lot, but when you add the other nine sites, you can see how quickly the database will grow. And the data needs to be stored for 20 years, so we needed a database that could easily handle such a large amount of information."
"The leaders of this international project were aware of Caché's reputation for functionality and performance, including the fact that Caché can store a large amount of data in a compact way because of its efficient multidimensional data engine," said Schild. "Caché was the only database we could have built this system on."