Astronomers’ tools

5 years ago, on December 19, 2013, the ESA launched an orbital telescope called Gaia. Learn more about the Gaia mission on the official website of the European Space Agency or in the article by Vitaly Egorov (Billion pixels for a billion stars).

However, few people know what technology the agency chose for storing and processing the data collected by Gaia. Two years before the launch, in 2011, the developers were considering a number of candidates (see “Astrostatistics and Data Mining” by Luis Manuel Sarro, Laurent Eyer, William O’Mullane, Joris De Ridder, pp. 111-112):

• IBM DB2,
• PostgreSQL,
• Apache Hadoop,
• Apache Cassandra and
• InterSystems Caché (to be more precise, the Caché eXTreme Event Persistence technology).

Comparing the technologies side-by-side produced the following results (source):

The first four will probably sound familiar even to schoolchildren. But what is Caché XEP?

This is a sample Ensemble/Health Connect production which demonstrates how to receive an HL7 order (ORM) inbound from a file, extract fields (in this case, basic demographic information), and insert those into a table in an external SQL database via ODBC.  

Included in the zip file:

• Exported code
• Sample ORM message
• 'How to configure' doc 

I've asked a lot of questions leading up to this, so I wanted to share some of my progress.

The blue line represents the number of messages processed.  The background color represents the average response time.  You can see ticks for each hour (and bigger ticks for each day).   Hovering over any point in the graph will show you the numbers for that period in time.

This is super useful for "at a glance" performance monitoring as well as establishing patterns in our utilization.