The Business Case for InterSystems Ensemble
This document presents a business case for replacement of older interface engine software with our next-generation rapid integration product, Ensemble. To illustrate the business case, our primary example will be an InterSystems customer (Metro Health Corporation) that replaced its SeeBeyond eGate (now Sun SeeBeyond) interface engine with Ensemble. Other organizations also will comment on reasons for switching to Ensemble.
Executive Summary
The best way to compare the performance of database products is in a head-to-head test using a real application, preferably one of your own. This is especially true when evaluating Caché's post-relational technology, because "standard" transaction processing benchmarking methodologies assume the restrictive "row and columns" format of a relational database. They cannot accurately predict the performance of real applications, which often use complex data models.
Introduction
Introduction
Experts estimate that 85% of all data exists in unstructured formats – held in e-mails, documents (contracts, memos, clinical notes, legal briefs), social media feeds, etc. Where structured data typically accounts for quantitative facts, the more interesting and potentially more valuable expert opinions and conclusions are often hidden in these unstructured formats. And with massive volumes of text being generated at unprecedented speed, there’s very little chance this information can be made useful without some process of synthesis or automation.
Introduction
Abstract
The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen InterSystems Caché as the database technology for the AGIS astrometric solution that will be used to analyze the celestial data captured by the Gaia satellite.
The Gaia mission is to create an accurate phase-map of about a billion celestial objects. During the mission, the AGIS solution will iteratively refine the accuracy of Gaia's spatial observations, ultimately achieving accuracies that are on the order of 20 microarcseconds.
Abstract
A benchmark of a real-world application, which loads data into a data warehouse for subsequent analysis, was performed. To conduct the benchmark, one module of the Oracle-based application was replicated in Caché ObjectScript. Only about 40 person-hours of work was required to duplicate the functionality of the original module in Caché.
Information Sharing Enables Health Plans to Leverage Data and Analytical Assets to Deliver Sustained Value
Executive Summary
The shared-risk payment models that are central to health reform all require tight coordination among payers, providers, and patients if they are to succeed. As payers and providers enter into more and more such agreements, they need to enhance success by communicating and collaborating more effectively with their partners and actively engaging, supporting, and empowering their members.
Introduction
By now, anybody working in the technology sector will have heard of Cloud computing. But the concept is increasingly being paid attention to outside of IT departments, with growing recognition among boardlevel executives of the potential of this range of innovations. Frequently, senior personnel are hearing stories about how the Cloud helps organizations reduce costs, boost efficiency and expand their operations, so they’ll be excited about what the Cloud can do for them.
Introduction
Australia's recent launch of the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) - a significant step towards establishing a national e-Health infrastructure - has simultaneously provided a boost to shared Electronic Patient Record (EPR) projects and delivered a wake-up call to healthcare providers about their readiness for connected care initiatives. In countries around the world, the era of connected care is here.
Executive Summary
InterSystems HealthShareÆ and InterSystems EnsembleÆ both provide a rapid integration and development platform with built-in capabilities for the high-speed processing of HL7 messages. For the purposes of HL7 v2 message routing the two products are equivalent in performance. For brevity, this document will just say Ensemble in many places but it should be taken to apply equally to both products.
Providing a reliable infrastructure for rapid, unattended, automated failover
Technology Overview
Traditional availability and replication solutions often require substantial capital investments in infrastructure, deployment, configuration, software licensing, and planning. Caché Database Mirroring (Mirroring) is designed to provide an economical solution for rapid, reliable, robust, automatic failover between two Caché systems, making mirroring the ideal automatic failover high-availability solution for the enterprise.
InterSystems has implemented a broad set of MultiValue extensions for its Caché multidimensional database. These extensions enable the migration of MultiValue applications to Caché and bring the full range of Caché object and SQL development technologies to MultiValue developers. The result: your existing MultiValue investments are preserved, you gain a broad spectrum of highly scalable deployment options, and your developers can combine the best of MultiValue, object, relational, and technologies to extend existing applications and build new ones.
Introduction
Impedance mismatch is a term commonly used to describe the problem of an object-oriented (OO) application housing its data in legacy relational databases (RDBMS). C++ programmers have dealt with it for years, and it is now a familiar problem to Java and other OO programmers.
An introduction to virtual documents
Ensemble virtual documents enable your productions to work with large and complex documents with little overhead.
What is a virtual document?
A virtual document is a special kind of Ensemble message, for use with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages and with XML documents.
How are virtual documents different from standard messages?
The Business Processing Language - for orchestration and long-running business processes.
Ensemble can orchestrate calls to external systems. Very often this is done to implement or automate a long-running business process - that is, real business processes where people interact with a series of different systems to complete complex tasks. BPL (the Business Processing Language) provides a graphical way to create these orchestrations.
How do you balance the need to achieve an early success with SOA against the requirement for an architecture that will deliver long term success? You don't want to get bogged down in architectural committees for three years, but you don't want to make short term decisions that will be roadblocks to long term success.
Are you new to Ensemble? InterSystems provides several tools to learn the basics of Ensemble and get on your way to becoming an expert in the technology. Before installing Ensemble, take a look at the Ensemble Technology Overview and Getting Started with Ensemble in documentation. Respectively, these documents explain features and major components of Ensemble as well as how to install the software.
Introduction
Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.
But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.
Introduction
HL7 V2 message routing solutions often have hundreds of business services, processes and operations. Inevitably things will go wrong and you have to monitor the production to be able to react quickly and resolve any problems before they can become serious issues.
Ensemble includes some powerful alerting capabilities that can help, but if you aren't careful you will be inundated with alerts and your inbox more or less becomes a copy of the event log defeating the object of the exercise.
Introduction
This paper describes how Ensemble behaves after a system crash or similar uncontrolled shutdown or failover. Ensemble is normally configured to start processing messages automatically when the operating system restarts or when the system has failed over to a cluster member or mirror member. No manual intervention is required. But, in order for your system to robustly handle system failure and restart, you must understand how Ensemble handles these conditions and develop your productions using the rules and guidelines in this document.
Ensemble is based on message flow, and a data transformation is a way to convert from one message type to another. DTL (Data Transformation Language) adds a layer to this - it provides a graphical way to do the conversion. This is really helpful because most of the time, people with domain-specific knowledge may not have extensive coding skills. However, you always have the ability to do some coding, so if you need or want to, this is available.
DTL has several components: the data transformation engine, the language itself, and the DTL editor.
