Enea's Polyhedra Database Selected For Massive Water Supply System In UK
National Water Supply and Wastewater Treatment System Services 10 Million People and 9,000 Square Miles in United Kingdom
San Jose, CA — Enea, the world leader in advanced device software, today announced that United Utilities has selected Enea's Polyhedra™ real-time database technology for use in its national water supply and wastewater management system. United Utilities will use the Polyhedra RDBMS (Relational Data Base Management System) to provide secure data storage for a large-scale distributed system that supplies water to 10 million subscribers over a 9,000 square-mile area in the United Kingdom.
United Utilities' water supply system employs a network of 2,200 Linux-based CompactPCI embedded computers with over 100,000 inputs to provide control and monitoring for the company's entire water supply and wastewater infrastructure. To enhance availability and reduce maintenance and management costs, Polyhedra runs in dual redundant mode on all 2,200 computers, as well the Unix-based central control system. The system takes full advantage of Polyhedra's fault-tolerant capabilities. It also leverages Polyhedra's internal scripting language and TCP/IP data transfer capabilities, which greatly simplifies the design of far-flung distributed systems spanning multiple processors, computers, and operating systems.
"We chose Polyhedra for several reasons. We needed a database that conformed to the SQL relational standards, so that we could leverage our existing knowledge and understanding of databases," said David Stow of United Utilities North West. "The database also needed to be able to run in memory on an embedded platform that could withstand an industrial environment and provide fault tolerant back up. Finally we needed a database that could provide active query functionality both locally and remotely, so that engineers on site can plug into the system and retrieve system values to drive animated diagrams and view the performance of the system on a computer locally. Polyhedra gave us this and more."
"Complex, large-scale distributed systems like the United Utilities water supply system require a secure, fault-tolerant database solution that provides standard interfaces and seamless access across multiple operating systems," said Dr. Nigel Day, product marketing manager for Polyhedra. "Enea's Polyhedra stands alone in this regard and typifies Enea's total solution, cross platform approach to device software optimization (DSO).
Polyhedra's multiplatform support also made it easy for United's engineers to migrate their existing solution from pSOS to Linux, greatly speeding deployment of the new system."
Polyhedra is an active SQL RDBMS that provides a secure, fault-tolerant, high-performance data repository for embedded systems applications. Featuring a small code footprint, Polyhedra uses a memory-resident design that boosts performance by up to an order of magnitude relative to conventional disk- and flash-based RDBMSs. Polyhedra also offers features like journaling and fault-tolerant mechanisms (i.e., failover control and fast reconnection) that ensure data persistence and enhance system availability.
Polyhedra's active, event-driven technology makes databases more robust, simplifies applications, and enhances performance. Active queries, for example, provide a fine-grained SQL push technology that notifies applications of data changes as soon as they occur. This eliminates the need for polling, thereby reducing processor and network bandwidth usage. Polyhedra also uses active, triggered, database-resident code, which enables application-level data integrity rules to be built right into the database. This enhances transaction-based data integrity mechanisms and provides in-database transformation upon client request or data change.
The Polyhedra Database is available for a broad range of operating systems, including OSE, VxWorks, Integrity, Linux, Windows and Unix. Polyhedra is currently used in projects ranging from mission critical defense systems to financial systems and telecom control systems. SOURCE: Enea