Result
Qvantel anticipates a number of potential benefits with the OpenEdge 11.4 Table Partitioning feature. “The ability to partition data means we can automatically move older, read-only data away from the live data in compliance with individual country regulations. That will save us time and money in regards to our own resources. And it will improve the performance of our live data,” says Kiviranta.
Pekka Nurminen, Services Director for Qvantel, says the ability to reduce their costs will benefit both Qvantel and its customers. “With Table Partitioning, we will have the ability to manage our data far more efficiently. That will reduce our own internal costs and, in turn, enable us to keep our pricing lower for our customers and prospects. That would certainly give us a competitive edge in this market.”
Table Partitioning will also significantly reduce Qvantel’s backup times. “We have some system backups that are taking 50+ hours. And other databases are so large that they are essentially in a continuous backup state,” explains Nurminen. “The ability to partition read-only data will dramatically reduce the amount of information we have to back up. We don’t know exactly what the improvement will be with Table Partitioning, but we know it will be tremendous. The ESAP is letting us get our hands on the feature now and begin testing it for ourselves.”
Minimizing downtime is crucial to Qvantel. Any downtime can mean a loss of tens of thousands of euros for its customers, and a loss to Qvantel as well. To ensure continuous availability, Qvantel currently maintains duplicate databases, switching between systems to perform basic maintenance and backups. “We have had some incidents of downtime with this method,” explains Kiviranta. “With Table Partitioning, we would be able to move the majority of the readonly data to other partitions or databases, which would reduce backups of the live data and greatly minimize any downtime.”
Nurminen says Qvantel is very eager to take advantage of the new OpenEdge Table Partitioning feature. “We have been waiting for this feature for years. Now that it is a reality, we want to take advantage of it as soon as possible. We are still in the early stages of identifying how we will use Table Partitioning. But I am confident that we will see immediate benefits once we implement this new OpenEdge feature.”