The Winterthur Group—Providing Efficient Access to a Wide Variety of Databases

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Goal

Offer customers efficient access to a wide variety of databases while, at the same time, streamlining the process of developing new applications.

Why they Selected DataDirect

DataDirect SequeLink provided the best support for configuring and managing many of the advanced features used to optimize efficiency in JDBC applications.

Business Benefits

Reduced the cost and complexity of creating applications that leverage the full capabilities of the JDBC framework.

Technical Benefits

The widest variety of JDBC-compliant drivers—with the best feature set, operational efficiency, and flexibility of configuration.

Managing Complex Database Access

In their ongoing application development efforts, the Winterthur Group discovered several critical areas where the JDBC framework failed to fill all their requirements. They turned to DataDirect's SequeLink solution to fill those gaps.

Winterthur Group is a leading Swiss insurance company with head office in Winterthur. As an international company, the Group provides a broad range of personal, property and casualty insurance products, as well as insurance solutions in life and pensions that are tailored to the individual needs of private and corporate clients. Winterthur Group has approximately 19,500 employees worldwide.

Like most major financial enterprises, Winterthur is continually adding new applications to their IT portfolio and updating old ones, with about 50 developers and eight software engineers on staff to support this ongoing development and maintenance effort. They have chosen the JDBC framework as a standardized interface to their relational databases.

The JDBC Framework—Powerful but Complex

In the past, Winterthur developers were hampered by several long-standing problems and limitations in the JDBC framework—among them inefficient use of resources in many of the standard drivers provided. The energetic evolution of the JDBC framework has eliminated many of these; however, a few areas can still stand improvement. For anyone who relies heavily on their applications, this means reduced development costs and better-performing applications.

One issue dogging the Winterthur IT department was that many features of JDBC, while powerful, can demand considerable effort to configure and keep track of. The department sought a server-based database connectivity solution that followed the JDBC specifications and allowed for access to the greatest variety of databases (both relational and other types)—all while simplifying support of some of these advanced features. DataDirect's SequeLink offered both.

"SequeLink best supported our requirements," says Dmitri Voronov, a software engineer at Winterthur. "These include configurability for connection pooling, save points for optimized transaction monitoring, and result and row sets."

SequeLink also significantly simplifies overall management—by acting as a central switching station, it offers a single point of administration for database access.

Listening to the Customer

The Winterthur Group also likes the fact that DataDirect support really listens to customers. The JDBC framework is rapidly evolving, and software development tools need to stay current to be truly effective. "The specification for the JDBC framework is two new releases per year," Voronov explains. "This means that all new technological developments are included—which applies especially to database connectivity. Here we keep in close contact with DataDirect support in order to pass along our experience with SequeLink for JDBC directly. Suggestions from application developers who use the framework to develop new applications are also introduced."

For The Winterthur Group to continue offering cutting-edge insurance products to their customers, their developers need the best tools to evolve the database infrastructure that supports those products. They chose DataDirect.