NetEconomy adds support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005

NetEconomy has already started the optimization of its solution for SQL Server 2005. The most demanding part of the solution for database performance is the Importer program, which takes care of storing and automatically analyzing financial transactions. The previous record-based Importer, which was fully optimized for SQL Server 2000, has been succeeded by a set-based Importer that utilizes features of SQL Server 2005 to boost performance even further. For NetEconomy customers this means that they can achieve more with less hardware, resulting in a lower Total Cost of Ownership.

"The ERASE solution monitors and analyzes financial transactions with the goal of preventing and detecting financial crime, and requires a database program that can reliably handle often massive and ever increasing volumes of transactions," said Jan Willem de Lange, Director of Research and Development at NetEconomy. "NetEconomy is pleased that with the incorporation of SQL Server 2005 in ERASE, our customers can capitalize on enhancements in their database management system to make it more scalable, stable and robust."

The factors that contribute to overall performance are CPU usage, memory utilization and I/O throughput. The better these three factors are balanced, the higher the performance of the system as a whole. Tests have shown that running the set-based Importer on a SQL Server 2005 system guarantees a well-balanced spread of the workload among these three factors. In other words, expensive hardware resources are utilized in a highly efficient manner.

With the introduction of SQL Server 2005 support, NetEconomy now also fully supports 64-bit database servers (running the 64-bit versions of the operating system as well as the database system). The 64-bit platform offers great potential for further scalability and performance enhancements.

The following test results serve as an example of the performance improvements with SQL Server 2005. As a baseline test, 50 files of 100,000 financial transactions each were imported using SQL Server 2000 running on a 32-bit server with 8 CPUs and 16 GB memory. The files were then imported in the same database in SQL Server 2005 running on a 64-bit server with 4 CPUs, 16 GB memory and a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows. The import performance showed an increase of 35% although the number of processors was halved.

The combination of the set-based Importer and SQL Server 2005 required 27% less data traffic to write the same information to the database, leading to lower costs for NetEconomy customers.

The CPU usage went down from 96% in the first test to 26% in the second test, showing that the set-based Importer and SQL Server 2005 utilize processing power much more efficiently, therefore reducing costs for NetEconomy customers. Further tests have shown that significant performance gains can be expected as new releases of the 64-bit operating system increasingly start utilizing the hardware resources of 64-bit servers to their full capacity.

NetEconomy plans to incorporate more of SQL Server 2005's new features into its solution and to continue performance optimization. As a result, customers can expect more performance gains, more scalability and flexibility, and more efficiency in hardware utilization in future releases of the ERASE Financial Crime Suite, thus strengthening ERASE's leading position as a highly cost-efficient risk monitoring solution.