Scottish Qualifications Authority

Actian Helps the Scottish Qualifications Authority Pass Every Test

Highlights

Hundreds of thousands of students worldwide depend on the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to certify their expertise – and SQA depends on Ingres Database, a leading open source database for business-critical applications, to get it done right. Even as the agency’s database grows by millions of multi-faceted records per year and its work expands to new markets in China, the Caribbean, and beyond, the robust performance and open source flexibility of Ingres enable SQA to pass every IT test with flying colors.

Challenge

Every student knows the stress that accompanies an important test. For the Scottish Qualifications Authority, such tests present a different kind of pressure – providing accurate, timely results to more than 150,000 academic and vocational students each year who depend on SQA-awarded qualifications for their academic and professional futures.

While Ingres already successfully powered SQA’s bespoke core system, increasing the number of subjects and students in recent years made an in-house redevelopment necessary. In addition to expanding capacity, the agency needed to maximize the system’s development agility to offer new functionality in response to growing user expectations. And with the hopes of so many aspirants depending on SQA’s performance, there was no room for error.

“Even a small mistake in this field very quickly becomes very public and the repercussions are felt for a long time,” explains Tony Douglas, senior enterprise systems manager for the agency. “Don’t forget, we’re talking about examination results here that students have worked hard for years to achieve and which will affect the whole of their lives. It’s a very stressful and emotional time for them and we have a huge responsibility to get things right the first time, every time.”

Solution

Although SQA’s IT infrastructure has seen considerable technical and administrative change over the years, one thing has remained constant – its choice of database. Having already relied on Ingres to meet critical IT requirements, the agency saw no reason to change course for its latest challenge. “By then we’d learned a lot about the system, including how easy the Ingres database was to manage and operate,” says Douglas. “We certainly didn’t want to lose the Ingres element.

”Far from blind loyalty, Douglas’ preference is based on firsthand experience with the alternatives. “We have competitors of Ingres elsewhere in our enterprise. Other database products are embedded in some of our thirdparty management applications, such as human resources and finance. Ingres is much easier to live with at both the housekeeping level and in terms of its ability to meet our needs for analytical views of the information in our main system. We are currently running 10 Ingres databases – the exam processing system and nine quality assurance and development systems. Together they absorb about the same amount of time and effort required by just one of the competition’s databases.”

“We are also excited about the move to open source,” Douglas adds. “I actually think it’s the way software has to go. It means vendors have got to be serious about support because it’s their only revenue stream.” And what about the quality of support behind Ingres? “A lot of the time we are wholly self-sufficient, but when we’ve called on the service, it has worked well.”

Results

With Ingres firmly in place, SQA has performed a series of modifications to its core system to provide the expanded functionality its users expect. A new Webbased query facility has opened the floodgates as schools and colleges across Scotland clamor to be given their own remote facilities, and the service has been extended to all high schools – in all approaching 3,000 remote clients at 1,700 sites. This, together with added historical information, has resulted in the growth of Ingres Database by about 3,500,000 records, each of them multi-faceted.

The most substantial change came when SQA used Ingres OpenROAD to move to Windows XP desktops at student registration and exam entry online. “This was not an incremental change. It was a huge project. We had pretty much half the SQA team working on it at one point when we moved to parallel testing,” recalls Douglas.

“There is a whole load of new stuff coming along,” says Douglas. “More and more is going online. This year, for example, we supplied results online for candidates in remote areas where the postal service may be slower. We also began accepting online submissions from markers in addition to the normal paper based process. Cutting out re-keying is going to make that part of the process faster and less prone to errors. It will also mean that our quality assurance process gets an earlier view of any inconsistencies.” The move to online submission of marks will result in an explosion of data since many examinations include multi-part questions, but by using the partition tables feature in Ingres Database, SQA will comfortably accommodate the increase while allowing queries to be run at high speed in parallel.

The success of these initiatives has helped SQA leverage its reputation as a center for excellence to deliver curriculum development support to Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, and Jordan, and begin certificating students in China. Meanwhile, the data systems team is currently working on the next big migration of the core system to take advantage of Linux clustering and new features within Ingres Database such as advanced Web connectivity.

“We have stayed with Ingres and we intend to for the foreseeable future,” affirms Douglas. It’s one more example of the continually evolving power of Ingres that continues to win the respect of SQA and of data professionals the world over. Not to mention the thanks of countless students in Scotland and around the world.