CAV Systems Ltd, a leading Israeli software company, has recently completed a major enhancement of the Evolve Suite – the company’s “relational from MUMPS” data mapping and migration tools – for The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Office of Protocol Research (OPR).

In the Spring of 2012, CAV Systems delivered the Evolve Data Migrator as a key element in MD Anderson’s eResearch project to significantly upgrade the organization’s Clinical Trials systems. The Data Migrator automates the process of mapping and migrating MUMPS data from MD Anderson’s current Clinical Trials System, PDMS, to a newly implemented Oracle-based Data Vault that consolidates data from a variety of sources for subsequent use by Data Analytics programs. The magnitude of the mapping and migration process can be gauged from the fact that the resulting Oracle database comprises 5,206 relational tables containing a total of 58,514 fields.

Prior to the enhancements, even with the benefits of the Evolve Data Migrator, the transfer of data from the PDMS system sitting on a legacy VAX/VMS platform to the Data Vault was a lengthy process involving multiple platforms. With the completion of the enhancements, the “freshness” of the Clinical Trials data in the Data Vault is now determined by the needs of the users of the Data Vault rather than the operational constraints of the multi-platform data extraction process. During the initial stages of implementation, the Data Vault data that is being sourced from the PDMS system is updated automatically on a scheduled daily basis with future plans to include several updates per day thereby ensuring minimal data latency.

The key difference between the Data Migrator and the enhanced system concerns the handling of changes that occur after the initial mapping and data migration of the MUMPS database to the Oracle Data Vault has been completed. Previously, if a change occurred in the production database, it required mapping and migrating the affected relational table in its
entirety even if only a single data element in the MUMPS database had changed. While the processing time for small tables may be relatively short, for very large tables the data latency introduced into the system could be significant. With the enhanced approach only the individual data elements that change need to be processed thereby reducing the entire data
transfer process by an order of magnitude.

Contact: Alex Hill
VP Corporate Development
CAV Systems Ltd
Email: alex.hill@cavsystems.com