AAH Pharmaceuticals deploys Ingres Database

Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, today announced that AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd., the UK’s leading distributor of pharmaceutical and healthcare products and services to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors, has significantly reduced operating costs with Ingres Database. Ingres Database is the leading open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost. With Ingres, AAH Pharmaceuticals has also improved the speed and flexibility of its databases across the board.

“Our users are able to run ad-hoc queries that simply couldn’t be run before, due to limitations on performance and functionality”

AAH has several business critical applications to ensure smooth, beneficial relationships with manufacturers and suppliers. The tech-savvy pharmaceutical company has seven databases for internal and external use to manage data on stock, sales, invoicing, and customer service. Thanks to the ease of management and robust performance of Ingres, AAH is now able to run mission critical applications seamlessly every day, on a future-proof platform.

“With Ingres, we have lowered our operation costs by as much as 50 percent compared to three years ago because we aren’t locked into licensing anymore, but rather a subscription model where we pay per chip we use,” said Richard David, database administrator, AAH.

In addition, AAH has improved the speed and flexibility of its databases. The higher availability and significantly better response time of the new system means that AAH can do more in much less time.

“Our users are able to run ad-hoc queries that simply couldn’t be run before, due to limitations on performance and functionality,” said Geraint Jones, product manager, AAH. “The scalability of the new systems means we’re able to leave our databases up for longer and have shaved just over an hour off our overnight batches.”

“The finance department is able to run reports that they could never think of running before,” added David. “Reports that once took hours are now taking a matter of minutes.”

The Ingres team worked along with AAH’s in-house database administrator to deploy Ingres Database across seven main production databases, totaling nearly 600 gigabytes of data. To ensure minimal downtime, each database was rolled out individually. The switch to open source also allowed AAH the flexibility to choose virtually any operating system and integrate with AAH’s commodity Linux servers.

“AAH Pharmaceuticals represents another success story for Ingres,” said Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide operations, Ingres. “More and more organizations are realizing that open source is the way to save money and effectively manage all the mission critical applications to keep the business running smoothly on a day-to-day basis.”