Northrop Grumman

Industry: Government Security & Intelligence

Challenge and Solution:

The third-largest U.S. defense contractor had a need for a complex, mission-critical interactive analysis involving billions of objects. What’s more, there was no existing methodology for this complex analysis, so any tool developed would have to be able to change on the fly as the methodology was fine tuned.

Before entering a design phase, the government asked for a study to prove that the analysis was possible at all. Relational databases were ruled out immediately, unable to perform the task. Finally, Objectivity/DB and a second ODBMS were evaluated head to head for ingest rate, analysis (speed and accuracy) and space consumption.

The Objectivity/DB Solution:

“Objectivity was the clear winner,” says Northrop Grumman’s David Capka. Objectivity/DB was unsurpassed in the hard criteria, and also came out on top in the intangibles: Capka points out that Objectivity provided support throughout the process like a partner, not a supplier. Today, after five years of run time in this application, Objectivity/DB’s performance has surpassed all the test criteria, the project has scaled beyond the original design goals without trouble, and there has been no down time whatsoever due to the database.

Case Study: Northrop Grumman