Children’s Hospital Oncology Division

At a leading U.S. children’s hospital, the Cancer Center team sought to access lab data from Netezza to glean insights in support of advancing treatment for children’s oncology. Access to this data is critical for making informed recommendations for patient treatment, and the team’s findings are published in academic journals around the world. The research teams – operating on the Mac platform – need to analyze clinical data stored in their IBM Netezza Data warehouse, which contains their lab data. The hospital chose the Magnitude Simba Netezza ODBC Data Connector to ensure streamlined access to that data.

Challenges

To conduct timely analysis and report on their findings, the research team needed to get critical lab data out of Netezza. The lab data stored in Netezza must be accessed efficiently, reliably and in a trusted manner so the research team can easily connect to critical patient information and collaborate in real-time on the Mac platform. The workflow itself fully depends on getting to trusted data. Realizing this required a high-reliability connection, the team leaders conducted an evaluation of the Simba Netezza ODBC Data Connector, which proved to exceed their requirements.

Key requirements:

• Extract real-time data from Netezza
• Transform the data
• Share data and recommendations with colleagues
• Publish findings in academic journals worldwide

Solution

The Simba Neteeza ODBC Data Connector for Mac:

• Delivers seamless, reliable connectivity, enabling powerful analytics on all major platforms – without the need for complicated data extraction on data in Netezza data stores
• Provides different query processing modes that you can configure to modify how the driver runs queries and retrieves results into memory
• Complies with the ODBC data standard and adds important functionality such as Unicode, as well as 32- and 64-bit support for high-performance computing environments on all platforms

Results

The entire medical and research team were quickly able to gain real-time access of trusted data from Netezza for timely, critical analysis that informs immediate and future patient treatment by the hospital and other providers.

A successful evaluation (<20 days) and swift progress through a commercial agreement meant the team rapidly achieved scalable access to the data they need in support of full BI tool functionality, and real-time analytics.