canadian lottery

Canadian lottery system gambles on client/server
By Cole, Barb

The Ontario Corp. is taking a chance on client/server.

The company's host-based on-line gaming application system has served it well, by quickly and reliably processing ticket purchases daily from more than 7,500 retail sites.

But Ontario officials two years ago recognized the system's lack of flexibility and the need to start developing a new system that would allow them to more easily develop new games and better track customer information required to target sales.

"We needed modular applications that would allow us to add new games," said Reg St. Amour, director of systems development at Ontario Lottery.

"We also needed to better utilize the data we were collecting about our customers," he said.

Client/server computing will help Ontario accomplish these goals by enabling it to design a suite of applications that will be relatively easy to modify.

These applications, which will come on-line in September, will also give end users direct access to critical business information.

SYSTEM REDESIGN

Ontario Lottery's system redesign has begun by keeping the on-line transaction processing (OLTP] application for handling ticket purchases host-based.

"We didn't have faith that a [server-based] relational database would support our objective of 100,000 transactions per minute, " St. Amour said. But Ontario has turned to client/server computing to support a host of new applications. The organization is adding a suite of Sybase, Inc. SQL Server database applications, including product management, retail management, customer financial management and redemption management.

The applications are being written with Sybase's APT development tool, as well as via C programming. The organization also is implementing data warehouses to give selected departments access to specific data gleaned from the OLTP system and Sybase databases.

The data warehouses, which are still in the design phase, will be based on SQL Server and provide access to about 40 personal computer users via Trinzic Corp.'s Forest & Trees data access software.

The new system will utilize much of the existing hardware and network, but both had to be beefed up to support the new applications.

The old system consisted of 7,500 retail terminals connected to two Digital Equipment Corp. 8600 mainframes running Digital's Pathworks local-area network operating system.

The two VAX machines were connected by Ethernet cable, and end users could access them from desktop terminals.

APPLICATIONS ON THE MOVE

Under the new setup, the on-line gaming applications will be moved to a more powerful VAX 6610 mainframe supporting Pathworks, while the 8600s will be retired.

Data is now automatically extracted from the 6610 by Sybase applications running on two VAX 6610 mainframes, both of which are linked to two VAX 4600 minicomputers accessible to end users via desktop terminals.

The data warehouse applications

will run on two other VAX 4600s.

Ontario has replaced the Ethernet cable that previously linked its VAX's with a Fiber Distributed Data Interface to support the greater network traffic volume generated via the new applications.

Moving to client/server has had both its advantages and disadvantages, St. Amour said. "When it comes to performance, [client/server] re-lational databases have their limitations,"he said.

There's a shortage of good development and administrative tools for client/server, St. Amour said.

The lack of good version control software, for example, forced Ontario to develop its own such system using Digital's code management system.

Still, some application components need to be tracked manually, St. Amour added.

THE WINNING MOVE

Include application, networking and operational staff in every stage of the project.

Evaluate at least three database servers, and do your own benchmarks with real data.

Build modular applications that are easy to maintain and change.

Divide and conquer. Whenever possible, break up the project into manageable pieces.

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