InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
February 22, 1999
Manage Shared ResourcesFedEx analysts have direct access to package-tracking data via browsers.
By David Baum
n important aspect of Web application development is the establishment of an environment that's good at managing shared resources such as database connections, network connections, and memory. Federal Express Corp. learned this lesson when it created a Web-based reporting system to help its analysts gauge activity levels and profitability for its 46,000 drop points and service centers throughout the United States.Though FedEx is glad to send trucks to pick up packages, it's more economical if customers use the drop boxes and authorized shipping centers. "We're trying to expand the venue of getting packages in this way by making it easier for customers to get packages to us," says Ron Houston, manager of retail operations, systems, and support at FedEx.
Last June, Houston and others in FedEx's retail division rolled out a decision-support system that uses the company intranet and a self-service data warehouse to give FedEx managers easy access to information about package drop-off locations that are the most heavily used.
Rather than submitting requests for custom reports to FedEx's mainframe package-tracking system, analysts now have direct access to the information through their Web browsers. Data is downloaded from the package-tracking system to a database that resides on a multiprocessor Windows NT server.
FedEx analysts use browsers to query data and run reports with Information Builders' WebFocus, a data publishing and reporting system for accessing many different types of data through standard Web browsers. They can draw from preconfigured reports or create their own ad hoc queries, tapping directly into current drop-site usage data in a Microsoft SQL Server database. The database, which currently stores three months of historical shipment information, is being extended to store 25 months of data, increasing the warehouse's capacity from about 20 million records to more than 250 million, or 45 Gbytes.
Houston says the average response time is about 10 seconds for complex reports. WebFocus uses a combination of queuing, load balancing, and failover capabilities to ensure good performance for hundreds of concurrent users at 60 FedEx locations. Kevin Quinn, a director in the Enterprise Reporting division at Information Builders, explains how the technology works. "With queuing, if there are 100 simultaneous sessions allowed by the Web server, rather than bumping the 101st user with a 'server not available' error message, that user will be placed in a queue in a wait state for a predefined period," he says.
Load balancing allows numerous application incidences to be established in a cluster on multiple servers, Quinn says. Requests can be routed among them, either on a random or round-robin basis. Multiple incidences of a WebFocus application can be installed on multiple servers, with scalability all the way up the mainframe.
Return to main story, "Scalable Web Apps."
Illustration by Matt Foster
Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page
Featured Microsite
