The high-profile Winter TopTen program recognizes database practitioners whose achievements have advanced the boundaries of database size and power. The program discloses the products, platforms, and architectures that support the leading implementations. Its objective is also to salute the vendors and database-related organizations whose products and services are enabling the world’s biggest data repositories.

WinterCorp named NonStop SQL database implementations from both Sprint and HP as first-place 2005 TopTen award winners. Altogether, NonStop SQL implementations received a total of four TopTen awards. Overall, HP customers received twice as many data warehouse awards as any other server vendor, demonstrating leadership in high-end data warehousing among the databases surveyed.

Sprint was named the WinterCorp TopTen first-place winner for the largest database as measured by row count (data warehouse: number of rows). Its NonStop SQL database implementation comprises more than 2.847 trillion rows—nearly 50 percent more rows than second-place winner AT&T Labs Research and a fivefold increase since the last survey was conducted in 2003. Sprint, a global communications company serving in excess of 26 million business and residential customers in more than 70 countries, counts on NonStop servers across its enterprise.

HP’s own Integration Hub supply chain management solution was honored with awards for both peak workload (mainframe and other) and normalized data volume (scientific and archive category), among several other WinterCorp Top Ten awards. Based on NonStop SQL software, the HP Integration Hub solution utilizes sophisticated messaging middleware combined with the innovative Real Time Data Store (RTDS) to integrate 172 multiversion enterprise resource planning (ERP) database instances and establish communication between previously isolated applications without the need for large numbers of custom-written interfaces. The result is centralization of key business data, which enables the combination of historical and real-time information into a phenomenally powerful decision-making tool and a consistent, integrated view of the entire supply chain with subsecond response time. The solution has been estimated to provide HP with a one-time savings of US$39 million, and ongoing benefits of $9 million per year.

NonStop SQL databases easily perform both transactions and queries against a massive repository of data, allowing companies to maintain a single database that can be accessed in real time at peak performance. By contrast, implementations from other vendors typically require two or more separate, federated databases to do the same work. In order to maintain performance levels in a federated database implementation, one database is tuned for transactions and another for queries. This design is harder to manage and the information housed in the query database is frequently less current than that of the transaction database.

NonStop customers, by contrast, enjoy the unique advantages that result from the massive scalability of NonStop SQL software. They can house a virtually limitless amount of data in a single database and use it in real time for both queries and transactions. Management is far easier, the design is flexible, and both historical and real-time information is centralized and easy to access. Not surprisingly, many HP customers prefer to keep these and other NonStop technology benefits as their best-kept secret—so they can continue to leverage the competitive advantage.

Find out more about NonStop SQL database products.