Unleashing the power of all the data governments have collected over the years is one of the keys to better decision making. The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) plans, maintains, and improves the highway, rail, maritime, public transportation, and aviation infrastructure in the state. Based in Jackson, it has 100 field offices, more than 3,000 employees, and an annual budget of U.S.$900 million.
In late 2009, MDOT was managing its data using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise data management software, and although MDOT was pleased with it, the agency’s needs were about to change. In conjunction with the development of a new portal system to be powered by Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, MDOT planned to move many large engineering documents into its database. “These documents are several hundred megabytes apiece in size, totaling two terabytes of data all together,” says Ken Slay, Project Manager at MDOT. “We could see that storage was going to become an issue.” MDOT was also interested in increasing its business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The agency wanted to take advantage of the vast amounts of content it had in reports, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and other types of communications. MDOT wanted new data management software that could store and quickly search large amounts of data while improving its capabilities to analyze business intelligence and report on geospatial data.
MDOT solution was to upgrade to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, which works with Microsoft Excel 2010 for business intelligence and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 for collaboration. SQL Server 2008 R2 includes two new features that help organizations efficiently manage data. With the first feature, the agency can move storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) to external storage solutions; this feature is called Remote BLOB Storage (RBS). RBS maintains the integrity and reliability of the externally stored data and makes it possible to do fast, full-text searches on that data.
Benefits included:
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