Woman’s Hospital saves time and money with IDERA SQL Solutions

OVERVIEW

Woman’s Hospital is one of the first women’s specialty hospitals in the nation, and is currently one of the largest in the United States. Its main campus is located Baton Rouge, LA, which includes the Center for Wellness, Child Development Center, Business and Technology Center, Graphic Services/Print Shop, Health Clinics and mobile mammography services. For the past seven years, Woman’s has been named one of Modern Healthcare magazine’s Top 100 Best Places to Work in Healthcare.

Woman’s employs more than 2,000 full-time, part-time, contract and PRN employees. As the hospital has grown through time, so has its datacenter. In total, Woman’s has 483 databases across 76 installations of SQL Server ranging from small size (1 MB) to large scale (500 GB) with a total footprint of 9.5 TB of data being managed by only one full-time database administrator (DBA).

The role of database administrator at Woman’s Hospital is to install SQL Server per accepted best practices, implement proper maintenance, evaluate performance, and consult with various departments on upcoming plans and implementations.

THE CHALLENGE

Woman’s Hospital faced two major challenges with their growing database sizes. One was the standard practice of backup and recovery of data to or from local drives, and archiving data into local tape drives, an issue where extended backup windows tend to slow down response times from an application. Large (200+ GB) databases were taking more than 5 hours to complete the backup process and another 4 to 5 hours to get the files to tape. In addition, the sizes of uncompressed backups were maxing out Woman’s tape archive system.

“We had more data than it could handle,” observed Robert Bishop, Database Administrator at Woman’s Hospital.
Performance was also a big concern for Woman’s data repository system. As data from medical documentation grew to more than 400 GB of data with 100s of millions of rows, it became challenging to store, let alone create “real-time” reports on a patient.