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How The Core Computer Group Uses DataDirect XQuery®
XQuery Saving Lives: Data Integration Using DataDirect XQuery
When the Volpe Center and the Transportation Information Project Support (TRIPS) contractors, lead by CSC,
were requested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) - part of the U.S. Department of
Transportation - the goal was simple: provide an efficient way to deliver Car Crash Information in an open,
public format following the US-federal standards and compliance rules.
The information, collected since 1997 under the Electronic Car Crash Data System, averages out data
involving approximately 5,000 accidents every year. Data is collected in 24 sites around the country and
consolidated in a large Oracle database (500 GigaBytes). NHTSA wanted to make the information available to
several groups of people, including Department of Transportation researchers, insurance company
investigators, vehicle manufacturers and the general public.
Previously, all data distribution had taken place using flat files and various proprietary formats; new federal
regulations and technology evolution empowered the Volpe Center to move to the current open standard: XML.
Doing Things the Old-Fashioned Way
Initially, the engineers at the Volpe Center explored using a conventional
approach — SQL queries driven by Java code. They determined that moving
data from a database into XML using SQL and Java would require about 50
Java classes and 150 SQL statements for one study type. Obviously, a
project of this magnitude would be complex to design and debug, and would
require considerable maintenance of code.
Doing Things a Better Way
After careful consideration in November 2005 it was determined that a better
option was to store the data in an XML repository. The Volpe Center decided
to use DataDirect XQuery® to handle their XML and relational tasks. XQuery
allowed them to move all the data directly into XML files validated against the
specific Car Crash XML-schema design; all the XQueries for sub processing
data features such as search and dataset construction, are performed against
the XML files. The new architecture enabled by DataDirect XQuery requires
just a single Java class and 7 XQueries. Each XQuery encapsulates the
transformation rules clean of any other type of code, considerably reducing
maintenance efforts, and simplifying code.
“Building the XML repository from the Oracle relational database and later
executing the XQueries on the XML to traverse the data resulted in amazing
performance,” reports Juan Alfonso, senior software engineer at Core Computer Group, a TRIPS project contractor. “Moreover, a large extraction
from 500MB of XML data building datasets intended for SAS analysis took significantly less time compared to using different methods. Simple XQueries with
XPath expressions pointing to the XML repository locations performed easily using
the DataDirect XQuery implementation.”
Get The Information to the People
DataDirect and the TRIPS project team at the Volpe Center were instrumental in
developing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s new system, which
allows their customers to access important information quickly, efficiently, and
reliably. DataDirect XQuery, from Core Computer Group’s perspective, was
instrumental in enabling the Volpe Center to
efficiently deliver a powerful and reliable solution to
their customer.
“DataDirect XQuery is the one that worked, and it
worked with excellent performance, which we
demonstrated with our project,” Alfonso says in
summing it up. “With DataDirect XQuery we were
able to reduce code complexity, simplify code
maintenance and improve performance and
scalability.”
“Additionally, the next release of our series of car
crash studies will deploy a set of new features like
dynamic search capabilities and custom dataset
creation. The processing will be performed using a
backend generic XQuery factory, based on
DataDirect XQuery. The advantage to doing this
process directly from the XML repository, is that it will allow us to isolate the
final-public-deliverable data from the Oracle production database.”
Goal: Real-time lookup and distribution of high-volume data from XML and a large
(500 GB) database.
Why they selected DataDirect: By moving away from more conventional
approaches (such as Java code and SQL query statements), and exploring
different XQuery implementations, DataDirect XQuery was the most efficient
solution for both the relational to xml and later XML to XML data integration.
Business benefits: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was able to
provide a way for their researchers and customers to access the Car Crash
Information Collection database quickly and efficiently while saving development
time and effort.
Technical benefits: By choosing DataDirect XQuery, the Volpe Center and the
TRIPS contractors were able to move the data to XML files residing on the file
system and to drastically simplify the query code. The architecture the Volpe
Center developed using XQuery is powerful, efficient, stable, and easy to maintain.
About DataDirect Technologies
DataDirect Technologies offers the most comprehensive, proven line of data connectivity components available anywhere.
Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect Technologies to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data
sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET, as well as cutting-edge XML query
technologies.
© 2007 DataDirect Technologies
Corp. All rights reserved. DataDirect
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are the property of their respective
owners. 05/07
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