FairWarning Privacy Monitoring Solutions Rely on MySQL to Secure Patient Data
- by Rebecca Hansen
FairWarning® solutions
have audited well over 120 billion
events, each of which was processed and stored in a MySQL database. FairWarning is the world's leading
supplier of privacy monitoring solutions for electronic health records, relied
on by over 1,200 Hospitals and 5,000 Clinics to keep their patients' data safe.
In January 2014, FairWarning was
awarded the highest commendation in healthcare IT as the first ever Category Leader
for Patient Privacy Monitoring in the "2013 Best in KLAS: Software &
Services" report[1].
FairWarning has used MySQL as their solutions’ database from
their start in 2005 to worldwide expansion and market leadership. FairWarning recently migrated their
solutions from MyISAM to InnoDB and updated from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6. Following are some of benefits they’ve
had as a result of those changes and reasons for their continued reliance on
MySQL (from FairWarning
MySQL Case Study).
Scalability to Handle Terabytes of
Data FairWarning's customers have a lot of data:
On average, FairWarning customers
receive over 700,000 events to be
processed daily.
Over 25% of their customers receive over 30 million events per day, which
equates to over 1 billion events and
nearly one terabyte (TB) of new data each month.
Databases range in size from a few
hundred GBs to 10+ TBs for
enterprise deployments (data are rolled off after 13 months).
Low or
Zero Admin = Few DBAs "MySQL
has not required a lot of administration. After it's been tuned, configured,
and optimized for size on initial setup, we have very low administrative costs.
I can scale and add more customers
without adding DBAs. This has had a big, positive impact on our business.” - Chris Arnold, FairWarning Vice President of Product
Management and Engineering.
Performance Schema As the size of FairWarning's
customers has increased, so have their tables and data volumes. MySQL 5.6’ new
maintenance and management features have helped FairWarning keep up. In
particular, MySQL 5.6 performance
schema’s low-level metrics have provided critical insight into how the system
is performing and why.
Support for Mutli-CPU Threads MySQL 5.6' support for multiple
concurrent CPU threads, and FairWarning's custom data loader allow multiple
files to load into a single table simultaneously vs. one at a time. As a
result, their data load time has been
reduced by 500%.
MySQL Enterprise Hot Backup Because hospitals and clinics
never stop, FairWarning solutions can’t either. FairWarning
changed from using mysqldump to MySQL Enterprise Hot Backup, which has reduced
downtime, restore time, and storage requirements. For many of their larger customers, restore time has decreased by 80%.
MySQL
Enterprise Edition and Product Roadmap Provide Complete Solution "MySQL's product
roadmap fully addresses our needs. We like the fact that MySQL Enterprise
Edition has everything included; there's no need to purchase separate modules." - Chris Arnold
Learn
More>>
FairWarning
MySQL Case Study
Why
MySQL 5.6 is an Even Better Embedded Database for Your Products presentation
Updating
Your Products to MySQL 5.6, Best Practices for OEMs on-demand webinar (audio
and / or slides + Q&A transcript)
MyISAM
to InnoDB – Why and How on-demand webinar (same
stuff)
Top
10 Reasons to Use MySQL as an Embedded Database white
paper
[1] 2013 Best
in KLAS: Software & Services report, January, 2014. © 2014 KLAS
Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.