Fast response to ad-hoc queries Medicaid payment data is fed into the database from the Department of Health claims system, which processes payments. MFCU developed its own algorithms to recognize activities that could indicate fraudulent behavior. A sample ad-hoc query may involve researching an abnormally high number of claims from a certain doctor. The physical database design is critical to the success of the data warehouse and has been carefully configured to leverage the power of the AlphaServer and StorageWorks systems. Partitioning permits large tables to be broken into more manageable subsets.
Queries extract rows from partitions, rather than scanning the entire table.
As a result, end-users bypass extraneous data stored in the system, focusing data functions only on the partitions relevant to the query. Once partitioned, parallelism enables users to apply many simultaneous threads of execution to the task at hand, balancing workloads across the AlphaServer system's 10 processors and hundreds of StorageWorks disks to reduce bottlenecks and increase system response. Now, MCFU says it is able to table scan 150 GB of claims data, comprised of more than 852 million rows, in 36 minutes. Considering that 300 simultaneous users could perform similar queries at any given time, this example is a testament to MFCU's robust ad-hoc environment. The data warehouse has received wide acceptance by the user community and each week the number of requests submitted to the warehouse grows.