The trouble with laptops

Walk into your local coffee shop or favorite lunch place and you’ll see laptops and "netbooks" at practically every table. Welcome to the wireless world! A world, unfortunately, that is fraught with danger, where corporate and personal information can be stolen right out from under your keyboard. The reason? Most wireless "hotspots" use weak or no encryption/security. While this makes it easy for you to connect, it also makes it easy for hackers to spy on you. And once you’re online at your favorite WiFi hotspot, hackers can quietly probe your computer, stealing passwords, data — even your identity. But things are not as dire as this scenario makes it seem. Hackers can be stopped if you use a firewall. But you need to be selective. Some firewalls are almost (but not quite) more trouble than they're worth with constant popups and alerts and the dramatic performance slowdown they inflict on your system. The best plan, then, may be to turn to an expert to help you select and properly configure a solution. At Qbase, for example, our engineers can configure personal firewall solutions for your mobile workforce that strike a delicate balance between restrictive and functional. In fact, in most cases you won’t even know the firewall is working. But all of those frustrated hackers will...

The secret to effective data disaster recovery

As a data company, Qbase is not focused exclusively on collecting, merging, cleansing, and migrating data. We are also keen on preserving data. A key component of data preservation is having a workable recovery plan. However, once you have a plan is in place, don't do what a lot of businesses do: relax and let the backup solution run “on its own.” (There they sit, falsely confident that all backups are complete and readable, thinking to themselves, "What could possibly go wrong?") What you should do instead, because you're not complacent, because you're smarter than that, is to be just a bit more proactive with your disaster recovery system. How? By creating an easy-to-follow procedure for quickly verifying and auditing your data backups. What should this plan include? At the very least, regular testing to verify that your data restores correctly to various temporary locations. It should also include testing to verify the data consistency of the restored files. A truly good plan will also include a strategy for auditing daily backup logs, as well as a contingency plan for when — not if! — one of your backups does not complete successfully. Be proactive and you'll find yourself in a much better position should disaster strike down the road. Only then can you truly and confidently relax.

Our software & database development expertise

The Qbase Information Platform™, or QIP™, is a hosted data repository two years in conjunction with our partners at GDAHA, the Greater Dayton Area Hospital Association. QIP™ allows Ohio’s largest hospital association and its 20+ healthcare organizations to aggregate, condition, and view critical emergency room operations data up to 95% faster than before this technology was developed and deployed. This puts the power of the data in the hands of the people who need it, so they can make timely operational decisions that affect how the Dayton region delivers emergency healthcare services to its population. Development was an iterative process to ensure that Qbase designed exactly what the experts at GDAHA required. The system’s main feature is its easy-to-navigate dashboard that allows for the drilling down on and filtering of the data to expose trends otherwise “buried” in the statistical databases. The graphical dashboard presents data from multiple databases within a secure online system as a managed repository. The data can then be analyzed from different perspectives using intuitive drop-down menus, buttons, and check boxes which enable the user to include or exclude specific data sources and views. Data, rather than being restricted to rows and columns of raw numbers as in most data views, now, within QIP™, display as color-coded, dynamic visuals. These visuals — which include bar charts, pie charts, and other familiar graphic types — are fully customizable in size, shape, format, color and of course, data content. Most importantly, the full capabilities of the QIP™ system can be transferred to other hospital operational functions quite easily — it’s all about the data.

Our data transformation expertise

Today's post is all about data transformation, and how Qbase does it differently. Sure, there are a whole lot of commercial transformation engines out there, but what makes Qbase better? Well, it really comes down to the technological advancements we have developed for our transformation engine: Qbase Data Transformer™. These advancements are in the following areas: in our "non-blocking" data flow architecture; in our use of late binding based on the requirements of the data; in our leveraging of deliberate error processing (which allows processing to continue when certain known errors are encountered); and, finally, in our use of distributed HTC, where jobs run across multiple servers. Interested in the details on these differentiators? Read on...

• Data flow architecture — Qbase Data Transformer™ has been designed to run "non-blocking" (at least as much as the data flows allow). This allows large data sets to be writing finished results to output files even while original data sets are still being read.
• Late binding — Rather than making rigid requirements regarding which fields are required and in what order, we've designed QDT™ for maximum flexibility with respect to data source changes. We did this by basing data field requirements on a runtime binding against the requirements of the data flow. So, as long as the fields required by the transformation are present in some order, the job will run successfully. Any additional data not required by the flow is passed on unchanged.
• Deliberate error processing — By "deliberate error processing," we mean that each component in a QDT™ job is "aware" of explicit error types that allow bad data to continue to flow through the system, retaining its original form and error status. Many systems kick out records and fields as errors occur, but QDT™ can let these continue to flow through the system allowing their corresponding records to participate in subsequent processing (where it still makes sense, that is).
• Distributed High Throughout architecture — QDT™ jobs are able to run with individual components distributed across multiple servers in an HTC setup. This provides greater parallel processing and allows the job to move processing to systems which may have specific resources unavailable on other servers. When combined with the data flow architecture, this results in quite a boon to overall throughput.

Find out how we can put these superior technologies to work for you today.