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Microsoft SQL Server
Customer Solution Case Study
9-Terabyte Database Moved to Microsoft SQL
Server for Performance, Lower TCO
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Healthcare
Customer Profile
Based in Nashville, Tennessee, AIM
Healthcare Services is a claims cost
management consulting firm for the
healthcare industry.
Business Situation
AIM needed to replace its data mining
infrastructure to support future growth of
and functionality for its 9-terabyte
database.
Solution
AIM migrated from a UNIX\Oracle solution
to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 running
on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003,
Enterprise Edition.
Benefits
 Ease of migration
 Enterprise-class performance
 Lower total cost of ownership
 Great development tools
“Adding things like a reporting solution or OLAP
services, the costs just kept building up on the Oracle
side while they remained the same on the SQL Server
side.”
Adam Solesby, Director of Strategic Development, AIM Healthcare Services
AIM Healthcare Services helps insurance companies and hospitals
hold down expenses by mining through terabytes of data looking for
billing errors, duplicate payments, coding mistakes, and other
abnormalities. As its database topped 9 terabytes, and demand for
its services grew, the company needed to rewrite its supporting
applications and provide a more scalable infrastructure. AIM
decided to move its data from a UNIX\Oracle 9i stack to a solution
based on Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition, running
on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Enterprise Edition. The
supporting applications were written using Microsoft Visual Studio®
.NET 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Microsoft SQL
Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) was used for automating the
database transfer from Oracle. AIM is seeing enterprise-grade
performance while enjoying a lower total cost of ownership.
“The SQL Server
Migration Assistant,
along with its Schema
and Data Migrator, and
its SQL Converter
feature, was an
important migration aid,
automatically converting
99 percent of our
database code.”
Robert Francis, Data Architect, AIM Healthcare
Services
Situation
AIM Healthcare Services is a data intelligence
and claims cost management firm with a
national reputation as a responsive,
knowledgeable partner bringing added-value
benefits to every relationship. AIM specializes
in the reduction of healthcare costs in the
public and private sectors by identifying,
validating, recovering, and preventing claims
overpayments. AIM utilizes patent-pending
technology in its specialized discovery
process. In 2003, AIM identified in excess of
U.S.$610 million in overpaid claims for its
clients, and in 2004 recovered more than $1
billion.
The company performs data mining
operations against some 9 terabytes of data
to help its customers identify billing errors
such as overpayments, coding errors,
subrogation cases, and potential fraud. AIM
originally deployed its data mining operations
using an Oracle 9i database running on the
UNIX operating system. But as demand for
the services and the size of the database
grew, the company saw a need to rewrite its
data mining and supporting applications. In
preparing for the new development project,
AIM considered using other databases,
operating systems, and hardware.
The company had solid experience with the
UNIX operating system, and it had been
experimenting with Linux. However it had also
been moving increasingly more of its
operations to the Microsoft® SQL Server™
2000 database running on Microsoft
Windows Server™ 2003 operating system
because AIM had been impressed with the
performance, reliability, ease of use, and
licensing costs. SQL Server 2000 and
Windows Server 2003 are part of Microsoft
Windows Server System™ integrated server
software.
A key concern was database migration. The
company needed to find a way to easily
migrate its 9 terabytes of data without
disrupting day-to-day operations.
As AIM considered which database and
operating system to use, it wanted to ensure
that the new solution would:
Support ease of migration.
Provide enterprise-class performance
across its very large database.
 Offer a powerful development environment.
 Provide lower total cost of ownership.


Solution
AIM Healthcare Services decided to migrate
its 9-terabyte database, which supports
about 200 internal users, from Oracle to SQL
Server 2000 Enterprise Edition hosted on
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition,
and running on an Intel-based computer. The
decision mapped well with the fact that in
recent years the company had been
progressively moving more of its operations
away from the UNIX operating systems to
Microsoft Windows® operating system, and
had been moving its Oracle databases to SQL
Server.
Although the company considered Linux as
an option for the operating system, it decided
that it wanted to take advantage of its
growing knowledge of the Windows operating
system, and not introduce a new operating
system and the administrative complexities
that would come with it. AIM, which creates
most of its applications in-house, also wanted
to use Microsoft development tools.
The company also was impressed with SQL
Server Migration Assistant (SSMA), a tool that
helps customers to migrate their applications
from other databases to SQL Server easily
and in a predictable manner. The tool
automates almost every aspect of database
migration. As a result, the time, cost, and
risks associated with migrating to SQL Server
can be greatly reduced.
“Since moving to SQL
Server we’ve been able
to respond much more
quickly to development
requests from our
customers.”
Adam Solesby, Director of Strategic
Development, AIM Healthcare Services
SSMA consists of the following major
components:
Migration Analyzer—evaluates the
complexity of the migration project
 Schema and Data Migrator and SQL
Converter—performs database conversion
and provides a powerful integrated
development environment for crossplatform database developers
 Migration Tester—provides automated
validation of the migration process

The entire 9-terabyte solution is hosted on a
single instance of SQL Server, running on an
IBM xSeries 445 computer with eight 32-bit
processors and 32 gigabytes (GB) of RAM.
Storage is on an EMC CLARiiON 4700 storage
area network (SAN).
AIM created a multitier data mining solution,
which it describes as a hybrid between a data
warehouse and an online transaction
processing (OLTP) system. The solution
architecture includes:
Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) Tier.
AIM uses SQL Server Data Transformation
Services (DTS) along with Transact-SQL (TSQL) transform procedures to perform ETL
processes against data imported from
some 120 customers. Data comes from a
range of mainframes and other sources,
and all requires custom translation. One
DTS package is used for each data source.
Although AIM has prescribed formats, most
of its customers prefer to send the data in
native formats, requiring transformation.
Data is loaded in batches that contain a
month’s worth of paid claims. These feeds
can be as large as 6 GB at a time. The
company processes several hundred feeds
per month. It also processes inserts and
updates throughout the day.
 Staging Tier. Much of the data
transformation is done in the staging tier.
Data transformation and validation is
performed using SQL Server stored
procedures. The transformations are
complex and often require up to 15 passes
through the data. T-SQL provides a
powerful platform for developing the
complex, high-performance, set-based
processing that must be performed on the
data.
 Data Tier. From staging, the data is loaded
into normalized tables on the data tier.
Complex, proprietary mining procedures
are then run iteratively on the data. AIM

Having decided on its operating system and
database, the company completely rewrote
its data mining and supporting applications,
using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003
development system and the Microsoft .NET
Framework. The .NET Framework is an
integral component of the Microsoft Windows
Server 2003 operating system that provides
a programming model and run time for Web
services, Web applications, and smart client
applications.
Data mining is at the heart of AIM operations,
as the company on a weekly or monthly
basis—depending upon the customer—
imports billing data and launches algorithms
against the data, searching for
inappropriately paid claims, duplicate
payments, contractual issues such as
subrogation, and a range of other factors
including abnormalities that might indicate
mistakes or fraud. The data mining is
performed using the company’s own
searching algorithms and through
incorporating business rules for specific
customers. The company created its own
data mining application using Visual Studio
.NET and the .NET Framework, and executes
much of the code through SQL Server stored
procedures. The company also used the
Microsoft Visual C#® development tool.
performs more than 300 passes through
the data.
 Business Logic Tier. AIM created a custom
application to apply its general data mining
algorithms and customer-specific business
rules. It uses Microsoft ADO.NET, the suite
of data access technologies included in the
Microsoft .NET Framework class libraries
for database connectivity.
 Data Abstraction Layer. The data
abstraction layer is a Web service
implemented in Microsoft .NET connection
software that allows the Web application to
request objects rather than having to query
data. This database abstraction gives the
company the flexibility to move data to new
databases without needing to change
application code.
 Presentation Tier. Users view data through
the presentation tier, which includes an
internally developed application created
using Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft
ASP.NET, a set of technologies in the
Microsoft .NET Framework for building Web
applications and Web services. The
Presentation Tier is hosted on Internet
Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, the
built-in Web server in Windows Server
2003. SQL Server Reporting Services is
used for creating operational reports for IT.
The company is planning expanded use of
Reporting Services with a future expansion
of data warehouse functionality beyond
data mining.
The new data warehouse supports about 250
ad-hoc queries per day. These are expensive
mining queries that exhaustively search
through the entire dataset. They are complex
and often involve as many as 15 joins. The
online systems execute hundreds of
thousands of transactions per day.
Benefits
Since moving its data mining infrastructure
from the UNIX\Oracle stack to the
Windows\SQL Server\Intel solution, AIM
Healthcare Services has enjoyed a number of
benefits, including ease of migration,
enterprise-class performance across its very
large database, lower total cost of ownership,
and powerful development tools. The
company also is looking forward to deploying
SQL Server 2005 because of features
including SQL Server Integration Services
(SSIS), Table Partitioning, Data Mining, and
SQL CLR.
Ease of Migration
When dealing with terabytes of data, ease of
migration becomes a big consideration. AIM
benefited from using the SSMA because it
automates almost every aspect of database
migration. As a result, the time, cost, and
risks associated with migrating the data were
greatly reduced.
By using the Migration Analyzer, a feature of
Migration Assistant that examines the Oracle
database, AIM was able to understand the
migration challenge very clearly. The
information provided by the assessment
included the findings that conversion would
involve some:
600 tables
1,450 stored procedures
 150 functions
 1,000 exception blocks
 236,000 lines of code in stored
procedures


The Migration Analyzer determined that
SSMA could automatically convert 99 percent
of the database code from Oracle PL/SQL
code to SQL Server T- SQL code. Even with 99
percent of the code conversion accomplished
automatically, the project was still quite
demanding because of the size and
complexity of the database code and its
extensive use of dynamic SQL, which could
not be directly converted by the SQL
Converter.
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Robert Francis, Data Architect, AIM Healthcare
Services
The team reviewed and modified code,
eliminating some constructs that didn’t
perform as expected and removing some
obsolete code. When it was necessary to
provide alternate implementations for part of
the code that couldn’t be converted directly,
the SQL Converter was able to emit the
revised behavior during the conversion
whenever a pattern was detected in the
Oracle-based business logic that couldn’t be
converted directly to T-SQL. The fact that
these changes could be applied to all
applicable instances represented another
advantage of the SSMA SQL Converter.
“The SQL Server Migration Assistant, along
with its Schema and Data Migrator, and its
SQL Converter feature was an important
migration aid, automatically converting 99
percent of our database code,” says Robert
Francis, Data Architect at AIM Healthcare
Services. “SQL Server Migration Assistant
allowed us to migrate this highly complex
database in a most economical manner.”
An impressive element of the project was that
the database was growing rapidly during the
migration. “In less than one year we were
able to migrate a well-established application
from Oracle to SQL Server while at the same
size tripling the size of the database,” says
Adam Solesby, Director of Strategic
Development at AIM Healthcare Services.
“We increased the capacity of our claims
processing system and simultaneously
lowered our operational costs.”
Enterprise-class Performance
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition gives AIM
the robustness and performance it needs to
support its very large database, which is
already at 9 terabytes and is still growing. The
database supports about 200 internal users,
about half of which are concurrent users.
“The interesting thing about our database is
that it is both an OLTP database and a data
warehouse,” says Robert Francis, Data
Architect at AIM Healthcare Services. “We
load massive amounts of data—hundreds of
millions of rows—24 hours a day, into this
database. And at the same time we have 100
concurrent users hitting the database with
queries through our Web-based application.
Throughout all of this, SQL Server still
provides users with subsecond response
times. We’re seeing enterprise-grade
performance.”
The company plans to extend access to its
database reporting to customers. “With from
5 to 10 persons per customer accessing our
database, we’re looking at supporting an
additional 6,000 to 12,000 users,” says
Solesby. “All of our testing shows that SQL
Server will handle this growth.”
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
When AIM examined licensing costs, the
more closely it looked, the more attractive
SQL Server became. “From the very
beginning Oracle was a more expensive
option than SQL Server,” says Solesby. “But
with Oracle’s cafeteria pricing, in which you
pay additional fees to add functionality and
features that come standard with SQL Server,
we saw that we could end up paying several
times more than what we would pay for SQL
Server. Adding things like a reporting solution
or OLAP [online analytical processing]
services, the costs just kept building up on
the Oracle side while they remained the same
on the SQL Server side.”
Apart from licensing considerations, AIM was
also interested in finding a more affordable
hardware platform. As the company had
progressively moved more of its IT
infrastructure to Windows-based systems, it
had experienced excellent performance and
reliability using Intel-based servers. This
made it all the more attractive to move its
data mining operations off of the more
expensive Sun computer it had been using.
“At the same time we were considering
enhancing our disaster recovery
infrastructure,” says Solesby. “Even though
we were looking at specialized hardware for
disaster recovery, we found that Intel-based
systems were considerably less expensive
than UNIX-based solutions. And, again the
licensing costs and support costs are less.
What we pay Microsoft to run SQL Server is a
lot less than what we would pay Oracle to
accomplish the same tasks. Everything kept
pointing to a lower total cost of ownership by
moving to a solution built upon SQL Server,
the Windows operating system, and Intelbased hardware.”
Powerful Development Tools
Microsoft development tools such as Visual
C#, Visual Studio .NET 2003, and the .NET
Framework are much appreciated by AIM
developers. “Since moving to SQL Server
we’ve been able to respond much more
quickly to development requests from our
customers,” says Solesby.
“Microsoft obviously puts a lot of investment
into its development tools and into making
sure everything integrates well across its
products,” says Francis. “That provides great
value to us by making it faster and easier to
create solutions for our customers. These
tools, along with the lower licensing costs,
reduce the entry barrier for doing our own
research and development. Our developers
can experiment with the database and try
different techniques. All of this helps us
better serve our customers.”
Moving to SQL Server has also made it easier
for developers and database administrators
(DBAs) to work together. “We no longer have
the big stone wall between DBAs and
developers,” says Solesby. “We can take
advantage of the mindshare between the
two. I think Microsoft does a good job of
making easy things easy, while not removing
your ability to do hard things as well. So we
don’t waste a lot of time with archaic
controls, yet the DBAs have all the power they
need when it counts. Efficiencies like this
really add up.”
Looking Ahead to SQL Server 2005
AIM Healthcare Services plans an early
transition to Microsoft SQL Server 2005, the
next-generation data management and
analysis platform, to take advantage of
features, including:
SQL Server 2005 SSIS. SQL Server 2005
introduces a complete redesign of DTS,
now called SSIS that provides a
comprehensive ETL platform. “With SSIS
some of the things we now do with stored
procedures in the staging tier can be
performed as part of ETL,” says Francis.
 SQL Server 2005 Table Partitioning. New
for SQL Server 2005, the Table Partitioning
feature enhances scalability for very large
databases. “As we prepare to grow beyond
our 9-terabyte database, we see Table
Partitioning as a great scalability feature,”
says Solesby.
 SQL Server 2005 Data Mining. SQL Server
2005 introduces a number of new data
mining algorithms. “We currently perform
data mining using our own custom code
and stored procedures,” says Francis. “We
would very much like to take advantage of
the data mining algorithms in SQL Server
2005.”
 SQL Server 2005 SQL CLR. The Common
Language Runtime (CLR) is hosted from
within the database with SQL Server 2005.
“Most of our development is done using
Visual Studio .NET and the .NET
Framework, so we are very interested in
using CLR from within SQL Server,” says
Solesby. “We like the idea of reducing the
number of times we have to leave the
database to access an application. CLR will
help us stay within the database.”

For More Information
Microsoft Windows Server System
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Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
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Microsoft Windows Server System integrated
server infrastructure software is designed to
support end-to-end solutions built on
Windows Server 2003. It creates an
infrastructure based on integrated
innovation, Microsoft’s holistic approach to
building products and solutions that are
intrinsically designed to work together and
interact seamlessly with other data and
applications across your IT environment. This
helps you reduce the costs of ongoing
operations, deliver a more secure and
reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable
new capabilities for the future growth of your
business.
For more information about AIM Healthcare
products and services, call (615) 5031000 or visit the Web site at:
www.aimhealth.com
For more information about Windows Server
System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem
Software and Services
Microsoft Windows Server System
Hardware
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003,
 IBM xSeries 445 computer with eight 32Enterprise Edition
bit processors and 32 GB of RAM
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise  EMC CLARiiON 4700 SAN
Edition
 Microsoft Visual C#
 Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
 Technologies
− Microsoft Internet Information Services
version 6.0
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting
Services
− Microsoft .NET Framework
−

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT
MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS
SUMMARY.
Microsoft, Visual C#, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo,
Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either
registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in
the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks
are property of their respective owners.
Document published October 2005