How Distributel uses Interbase.

    I tried to adjust to the original information received from Dalton Calford:

We are a long distance phone company. We were the first to challenge Bell in the courts and win (opening up the way for most of our competition).

We started with custom solutions written in C and running on DOS machines (very basic custom embedded solutions). The original Database was based upon Btrieve and then when Btrieve could not handle some interface problems, paradox was used.

Very soon paradox was unable to handle the load and the database was directly ported to Interbase with Delphi 2 as the front end. That was back in 97 or so.

I came on the scene replacing my predecessor almost a year ago. At the time, the database was sitting at 18 GB with 2.5 years data in it. It was growing at a rate of 25 MB a day. The original design was such that some processes on the server took over 24 hours to complete, degrading everyone's performance.

Since then, we replaced all the UDF's on the server with stored procedures. We then redesigned the client to allow us to dynamically redirect there connection to whatever server/path we currently want. We re-wrote the client to look to different databases based upon time criteria and separated the database into multiple files with a current file that is between 7 and 12 GB in size (it covers a 3 month window) and historical databases that are around 8 GB each.

We are now inserting around 75-100 MB of records a day into the database. Our backups and restores (since they only deal with the current database) only take 3 hours and we have set up a offsite replication system that runs over a ISDN connection.

We have totally left the NT world and all of our database servers are now running Linux.

Our current configuration:

• 2 current database servers (Linux, 2.2.14 kernel, h/w raid 5 with 120 GB storage each)
• 3 Main offices connected by ISDN
• 1 Secondary office with support servers connected by ISDN
• 30 + users connecting to the database.
• automated IVR system that customers can dial up and get information about their telephone usage and account status using a regular handset. (The IVR system queries the database and logs all queries).
• The office that houses the main server only has 2 regular users in it (it is the development office).

So, I guess the short form is:

Real time, 24x7 database system with over 300 GB of online data spread across two provinces and 3 offices with both human and automated use of the database complete with fail over/load balancing and real time/delayed replication.

Oh yea, the company is "Distributel Communications Limited".

This page was last updated on 2000-12-31 21:23:04